As a seasoned gamer and long-time supporter of independent gaming, I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs with various platforms, but Itch.io has always been a reliable haven for unique, creative, and often quirky indie games. So, when I woke up to find it offline due to a “bogus phishing report” – allegedly from Funko, makers of those adorable yet ubiquitous Pop figures – I couldn’t help but feel a pang of disappointment.
Currently, the indie game platform Itch.io is down, and they attribute this issue to the company responsible for Funko Pop figurines.
Following a suspicious claim about phishing activities, the independent game store Itch.io is temporarily unavailable for users. Although their servers remain active, the site’s domain now redirects to IP addresses that do not belong to Itch.io, effectively making the website inaccessible at this time.
Just a few days following the gaming marketplace enabling users to utilize their itch.io URLs as their names on Bluesky accounts, there’s been an issue arising. This functionality is accessible after investing $10 on the platform; however, due to the current predicament with the domain, names generated in this manner are displaying an “invalid handle” error on Bluesky at present.
Itchi.io blames Funko
According to Itch.io’s own statement, the platform is accusing Funko – known for its popular pop culture collectibles such as Funko Pops – of being responsible for the shutdown. In a post on X (previously Twitter), they claimed that the outage occurred “due to their use of an ‘AI-powered’ Brand Protection Software called Brand Shield, which generated a false Phishing report to our registrar.
Without a doubt, @itchio has been shut down by @OriginalFunko due to their aggressive “AI-Powered” Brand Protection Software, @BrandShieldltd, falsely reporting a phishing issue to our domain registrar, @iwantmyname. Unfortunately, they disregarded our explanation and simply deactivated the domain without further discussion.
— itch.io (@itchio) December 9, 2024
The indie store mentioned in another post that they are currently on hold, waiting for a response from their domain registrar before they can activate their domain again.
Furthermore, to maintain transparency, we promptly removed the questionable page upon receiving the notification, as such disputes aren’t worth engaging in. However, it seems our domain was automatically disabled by our registrar’s system due to lack of acknowledgement of the removal, possibly because no one read the confirmation.
— itch.io (@itchio) December 9, 2024
How to enter Itch.io anyway
Itch.io anticipates resolving the issue with their domain name in a few hours. In the meantime, if you’re familiar with editing your hosts file (which links hostnames to IP addresses), you can use the IP address 45.33.107.166 as an alternative. However, don’t forget to delete this entry once their domain is restored to avoid any confusion.
Do you use Itch.io? Did you have problems entering the domain?
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2024-12-09 15:09