Itch.io went offline due to a ‘trash AI-powered’ phishing report

Indie game storefront Itch.io went offline early Monday morning after what it described as a bogus phishing report. While the game store’s servers were still online during the outage, the domain for the website pointed towards IP addresses that itch.io doesn’t own — making it inaccessible for most people.

After going offline at around 2AM ET, the site seemed to come back at around 7AM ET. Itch.io blames pop culture collectibles company Funko for the issues in a post on X, “because they use some trash ‘AI-powered’ Brand Protection Software called Brand Shield that created some bogus Phishing report to our registrar.”

While the disputed page was taken down, itch.io’s domain registrar, iwantmyname, still disabled the domain likely due to automated systems. According to a post on X, the indie game marketplace had to wait for the domain registrar to respond and re-enable its domain.

The domain issues come just days after itch.io started allowing its users to use its domain name for Bluesky accounts. If you have spent $10 on the platform then you have the option to use your itch.io profile URL on Bluesky, but the domain issues meant anyone who switched to the custom itch.io URLs had an “invalid handle” error on Bluesky until the main itch.io domain came back online.

Update, December 9th: Noted that Itch is back online.