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If you think you’re having a rough start to the week, spare a thought for the folks at indie game platform itch.io, who woke up Monday morning to discover that their domain had been taken down. The website, which hosts over 1 million games for sale, took to social media early on Monday morning to explain to its users why they couldn’t buy, download, or upload any of the games on itch.io, laying blame on an unexpected culprit – Funko.

As of the time of writing, all we know is that itch.io was down for several hours, with the company's social media posts blaming Funko and their use of brand protection software BrandShield. In a post shared early Monday, the company wrote, "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."

It is entirely possible (and even likely) that Funko was uninvolved in the incident, though itch.io has stated that BrandShield was acting on behalf of Funko when they created the report. Popverse reached out to the creator of the Funko Pop figurines that have become a staple of the convention scene over the years, but has yet to receive a response on the matter.

Upon receiving the phishing report, itch.io shared that it took down the page in question "because its not worth fighting stuff like that." However, their domain was still taken down because, as they posted, "no one read our confirmation of removal." Two hours after the initial social media posts, the company updated, "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." However, it added, "If the downtime exceeds 8 hours then we'll likely prioritize deploying a new domain." The situation was seemingly rectified before a new domain was deployed, although details of the resolution are unavailable.

itch.io remaining down for several hours on Monday morning meant that one of the largest distributors of indie video games on the Internet was unavailable during that time. Aside from making the site’s entire catalog unavailable – including any games already bought that need to be redownloaded – it also put an end to the game jams and charity bundles that itch.io has become known for. As it stands, they appear to be the victim of the dangers of outsourcing too many tasks to algorithms without sufficient human oversight along with poor customer service from their registrar. 

This is a developing story which we will update as more information becomes available.

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