After Scrabble rights holder Hasbro Inc. filed its copyright lawsuit against Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla for creating the game Scrabulous, the popular site Facebook, where Scrabulous has become a huge hit, promptly removed the entertainment application.
Hackers take the blame when EA\'s Scrabble offering goes down in flames. (IMG:EA)
Hasbro then started promoting its official Scrabble application via Facebook, which is licensed online by games publisher Electronic Arts. However, as it launched, EA’s Scrabble promptly went down to an apparent online attack.
"EA's Scrabble Facebook game experienced a malicious attack this morning, resulting in the disabling of Scrabble on Facebook," commented Electronic Arts in an LA Times report. "We're working with our partners to resolve this issue and have Scrabble back online and ready to play as soon as possible."
However, despite EA's statement, there is no solid proof that attackers took the game offline, or if the 15,000 people who currently play it have overloaded the service. The only thing EA is reporting is that a single hacker caused the service to go offline.
Prior to the emergence of Hasbro's lawsuit, RJ Softwares, creator of Scrabulous, reported that some 500,000 people were actively playing its alternative Scrabble-like game.
Some comments posted to the Facebook forums show the user base to be skeptical regarding the sudden hit taken by the official Scrabble application.
"I think their platform was overwhelmed with all the traffic it was receiving when people woke up and realized they could no longer play Scrabulous," offered one comment, while another openly questions EA's statement by saying: "Funny that Scrabulous never had any malicious attacks, LOL. Sounds pretty bogus to me."
Most Facebook users are moving on from Scrabble and the buggy nature of the EA-created game towards something new called Wordscraper, a fresh application developed by Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla as a sidestep to Hasbro's lawsuit.
"Wordscraper is not at all like Scrabulous, it is different and much better than Scrabulous! For example, all the tiles are different, and we can create our own rules! The only thing that appears to be the same is the very simple graphics -- what most of us appear to want in an FB game," reads one comment enthusing about Wordscraper.
The EA game was down for several hours, but is reported to be online at the time of this posting. However, it is slow and remains somewhat buggy.
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