Minecraft Squid Game tournament almost broke an entire country’s internet

A Squid Game-inspired Minecraft tournament was targeted by a cyberattack that left many people in Andorra with internet issues. 

As shared by IGN, last weekend a major Minecraft tournament that was inspired by the sadistic games in Squid Game was targeted by a cyberattack. The DDoS attack was initiated in the hopes of overwhelming Andorra’s internet service with a sudden overflow of traffic and resulted in the elimination of Team Andorra from the Squid Craft Games. 

Reporting the outage, NetBlocks - a Twitter account that tracks network disruptions and shutdowns across the globe - said: "Internet disruption registered on #Andorra Telecom on Saturday evening; the incident is attributed by the state telco to a DDoS attack targeting the high-stakes #SquidCraftGames Minecraft Twitch competition, resulting in the elimination of Team Andorra." 

The small country nestled between France and Spain only has a population of approximately 77,000 meaning it probably wasn’t too difficult to overwhelm Andorra’s network. Similar to the actual Netflix show the tournament was based on, it appears not everyone wanted to play fair in this set of survival games either. 150 players reportedly took part in the competition including a number of high-profile streamers. 

If you were surprised by the fact Minecraft players were holding a Squid Game-themed tournament, you shouldn’t be - since the series debuted on Netflix in September 2021 there’s been an overwhelming number of Squid Game themed events taking place in several games including GTA 5 which was flooded with Squid Game clones in its community servers, as well as a Squid Game mod in CS:GO, and even Squid Game scene recreations in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. 

Can’t wait for a second season of the survival games series? Find out what to watch next with our list of 10 Netflix shows to watch if you enjoyed Squid Game.