The platform for hosting indie games itch.io became unavailable for several hours on December 9 due to the actions of Funko, known as the manufacturer of the Funko Pop series of big-headed figurines.
Image source: Steam (Iblysi)
The administration of itch.io reported the incident. The site went down as a result of a complaint about one of the store pages from Funko’s intellectual property protection system, which is based on BrandShield’s AI.
“Funko literally took itch.io down because their junk AI brand protection from BrandShield created a bogus phishing report for our registrar iwantmyname, which ignored our response and disabled the domain.”,” reported itch.io.
Image Source: Video Games Chronicle
The itch.io administration assured that they had hidden the problematic page a few days ago when they received the notification, but the iwantmyname automatic system worked before a live employee could read the report.
The wrath of the BrandShield system and suspicions of phishing were brought upon itself by a page created by the user itch.io for the platformer Funko Fusion, released in September, with screenshots from the game and links to the official website.
Image source: itch.io
A representative of iwantmyname, in a comment to the Polygon portal, assured that the itch.io domain was restored after “The registrant has finally responded to our notice and has taken appropriate action to resolve the issue.”.
By now, the itch.io site is back to normal. The downtime period was about three hours, during which the service was unavailable to users, including gamers (the games themselves launched without problems) and developers.
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