One of the best websites for hosting indie games has been taken down by AI-powered brand protection software. Funko has taken down itch.io.
Open indie game marketplace itch.io has been taken down by Funko. The company’s AI-powered Brandshield IP protection software generated what itch.io describes as “some bogus phishing report to our registrar iwantmyname.” The company announced the outage on its social media platforms including X.
I kid you not, @itchio has been taken down by @OriginalFunko because they use some trash “AI Powered” Brand Protection Software called @BrandShieldltd that created some bogus Phishing report to our registrar, @iwantmynamewho ignored our response and just disabled the domain
— itch.io (@itchio) December 9, 2024
Here’s a full transcript of the tweet thread:
I kid you not, @itchio has been taken down by @OriginalFunko because they use some trash “AI Powered” Brand Protection Software called @BrandShieldltd that created some bogus Phishing report to our registrar, @iwantmyname , who ignored our response and just disabled the domain
I hope you are all having a nice Sunday evening
Also, for transparency, we *did* take the disputed page down as soon as we got the notice because it’s not worth fighting stuff like that. Regardless, our registrar’s automated system likely kicked to disable the domain since no one read our confirmation of removal.
We’re probably going to wait this one out. We considered putting up a new domain but there are implications with third party services that make it not a trivial swap. In the meantime, if you know how to tweak your hosts file use: 45.33.107.166 https://t.co/yZR3sKo1NJ
— itch.io (@itchio) December 9, 2024
itch.io did confirm in a reply on X that the servers are still there.but the website is still offline, and we hope the team over there can get things back on track. They appeared to have done everything that would be expected of such a large platform, and hopefully that will be more apparent if and when a human takes a look at this. In the latest update itch.io posted “If the downtime exceeds 8 hours then we’ll likely prioritize deploying a new domain. Hopefully things are able to get sorted out before then.” For now you can follow itch.io on X for more updates.
