Battle.net back online after login issues kept players out of Diablo 4 for hours

Update: And it's fixed. In an update on Twitter posted around four hours after Blizzard first said it was aware of the bug, the company said the "login issues have been resolved," and thanked fans for their patience.

Original story: Battle.net, Blizzard's own PC game launcher and storefront, and your only port of call (for now) to play games like Diablo 4, World of Warcraft, and other Blizzard games, is having technical issues. A tweet from the Blizzard CS EU account from earlier this morning says the company is "currently investigating an issue" affecting its authentication servers, which might cause "failed or slow login attempts" for users.

At time of writing, those issues are still ongoing, and are making always-online games like Diablo 4 inaccessible to many if not all players, which is certainly one way to gin up enthusiasm for that game's imminent arrival on Steam. PCG's own Sarah James found herself confronted by an infinite queue when she attempted to launch the game during the outage.

Launching Battle.net currently brings up a notification that reads, "We are aware of an issue affecting our authentication servers, which may result in slow or failed login attempts. We are currently investigating the cause and will provide updates as soon as they are available."

So the good news is that Blizzard says it's working on a fix, the bad news is that the company has said that multiple times in the last three-or-so hours. Clearly, whatever gremlin has worked its way into the Battle.net servers is proving difficult to dislodge.

Given that Diablo 4's full commitment to an always-online model has been controversial at best, and that some players actually seemed relatively optimistic in the wake of a gamut of news from the devs yesterday (including lots of details on its next season), there are definitely better times for an issue like this to happen. I imagine Blizzard isn't keen to remind people—at least some people—of how miffed they've been by D4's always-online nature immediately after winning some of them back over.

Blizzard says it's "working to resolve this ASAP," and I'll update this piece with any news on the matter as soon as I get it.