Well this is a sorry tale.

Wurm Online, a sandbox MMOG that has generally minded its own business for years, has suffered a DDOS attack late yesterday. With Wurm Online's developers offering a reward to catch those responsible, it's clearly serious business for them and has had significant repercussions on their servers.

In a first statement, they've said:

Shortly after todays update we were the target of a DDOS attack and our hosting provider had to pull us off the grid for now. We will be back as soon as possible but things are out of our hands since their other customers are affected. As we wrote in a previous news post we are planning on changing hosting anyways which should improve things for the future. We can offer 10 000 Euro for any tips or evidence leading to a conviction of the person responsible for this attack.

Since then, they've issued a few updates:

Most probably our hosting company will not put us back online until earliest noon tomorrow Swedish time when we have had possibility to discuss what to do. They just got back to me and the attack persists so there is nothing we can do but wait and investigate our options at this stage. We will compensate for lost premium time.

Since we do not know how, when or under which circumstances our current hosting company want to bring our servers back online we are working on retrieving the data from those servers and put on the new planned hosting. We have the new hosting prepared but it will take a while to set it up. The game will not be back online within the next 8 hours but we’ll do our best to keep going until they are. We’ll know more at around 20.00 hrs CET today.

Here's hoping they not only catch the idiots responsible, but that they get back on their feet quickly.