'Move-to-Earn' Game Stepn Hit With DDOS Attacks—Again

The popular crypto game Stepn, which uses Solana NFTs, was hit with a number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks this weekend, the third such occurrence in as many months.

According to the app’s Twitter page, Stepn's devs were still working to fix the issue at the time of this writing.

“We have been under multiple DDOS attacks in the past hours,” those behind the game said in a tweet on Sunday. “Securing the servers and recovery may take anywhere from 1 to 12 hours.”

Another tweet read: “We recommend you take some rest during the maintenance or otherwise the work-outs may not be recorded properly. Our engineers are working hard to fix the problems.”

And yesterday, users also were notified that the game was experiencing “network congestion” after it was hit with 25 million DDoS attacks in a short period.

A DDoS attack is when malicious actors try to bring down a website by overloading it with useless traffic. Such attacks are very common—particularly in the crypto world. 

Stepn is a “move-to-earn” app where users are rewarded for moving outdoors. Players have to buy Solana-based NFT (non-fungible token) sneakers to play the game, and earn tokens when they run or walk. 

The game, which calls itself a “Web3 lifestyle app,” has two tokens—one for utility (GST) and another for governance (GMT). 

Hackers seem hellbent on bringing down the popular app: In April and again in May, the game announced people were trying to cripple it by sending millions of DDoS attacks.