Indie Game Platform Itch.io Taken Offline After Phishing Report Error
Early Monday morning, popular indie game hosting platform Itch.io faced an unexpected outage after its domain registrar disabled its website. The takedown occurred following a phishing report filed by Funko, a collectible toy company, using automated brand protection software called BrandShield.
Itch.io criticized the report as false, calling BrandShield’s software “trash” and claiming it issued the report without proper verification. Despite Itch.io’s immediate response to address the flagged content, its domain registrar, Iwantmyname, allegedly used automation to disable the domain without reviewing the response.
“For transparency, we did take the disputed page down as soon as we got the notice because it’s not worth fighting stuff like that,” Itch.io explained in a statement. However, the automated systems in place still caused the platform to go offline.
BrandShield advertises its software as a tool to combat online brand abuse through automated phishing takedowns, but this incident highlights potential flaws in such systems when combined with minimal human oversight.
The outage has sparked discussions around the risks of relying on automated processes for critical decisions.
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