T1 faces a surprising loss at LCK quarterfinals

During the quarter-finals at the League of Legends Champions Korea (LCK) 2024 Playoffs, T1 saw a 3-0 loss against Hanwha Life Esports. The loss came as a huge surprise for fans, considering T1 is one of the best teams, and to go down with a single point did not sit well with fans.

While T1 is not immediately out and has another shot at reaching the grand finals, the situation is unfortunate. Fans are now blaming the recent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since February in LCK.

T1 Faker also admitted that the DDoS attacks affected the team’s performance because a lot of them were targeted at T1 members. This resulted in teams not being able to scrim or sometimes play on their main accounts.

LCK DDoS situation

During February's end, the LCK was hit with DDoS attacks that started disrupting matches and left players looking at their stuck characters for hours. A DDoS attack generally floods a server with too many requests, causing disconnections and latency issues.

This resulted in multiple delays and forced the LCK to host matches on offline servers. A few weeks later, the matches were again brought to online servers after putting up measures. However, the attacks shifted to teams, more notably T1.

An official post from T1 confirmed that the team is being targeted, with players being hit with DDoS attacks while streaming. The organization announced that the team will not be streaming for some time. Players were forced to swap accounts to play the game, while scrims were almost impossible, with players getting kicked out.

Faker responds in a post-match interview

During the post-match interview, Faker acknowledged that the team made some mistakes and the performance was not what the team expected. On being asked about the DDoS issue, Faker said that it did have some impact on the team as they could not practice on high level or scrims.

He further added that the loss overall was a mixed bag of the team not being able to practice while also not giving their best during the match, which led them to a loss. They will now be facing Dplus in an elimination match on April 7.