Independent Games Showcase itch.io went offline early Monday morning after what it described as a false phishing report. While the game store's servers were still online during the outage, the website's domain pointed to IP addresses that itch.io does not own, making it inaccessible to most people.
After going offline around 2 a.m. ET, the site appeared to be back up and running around 7 a.m. ET. Itch.io blames pop culture collectibles company Funko for problems in a <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/itchio/status/1866017758040993829″>publish in x“because they use a crappy 'ai-powered' brand protection software called Brand Shield that created a fake phishing report for our registrar.”
While the disputed page was removed, itch.io's domain registrar, i wantmynamestill disabled the domain probably due to automated systems. According to a <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/itchio/status/1866022784222245305″>publish in xthe indie games marketplace had to wait for the domain registrar to respond and re-enable their domain.
The domain issues come just days after itch.io began allowing its users to use its domain name for Bluesky accounts. If you spent $10 on the platform then you have the option of using your itch.io profile URL on Bluesky, but issues with the domain meant that anyone who switched to itch.io's custom URLs had an error of ” invalid identifier” on Bluesky until the main itch.io domain came back online.
Update, December 9: I noticed that Itch is back online.
