DreamLeague S25 grand final postponed mid-series as DDOS attacks strike Dota team

In what seems like an incident straight out of the early days of esports, the grand final for season 25 of ESL's DreamLeague event was stopped mid-way through the series due to mass DDOS attacks.

Team Spirit led Tundra 2-1 in the best-of-five final before players became unable to launch Dota 2 or enter the lobby. As a result, ESL has been forced to reschedule the grand final to March 4, leaving fans angry.

ESL announced the remaining matches for the DreamLeague final will be moved to March 4 at 4pm CET. "Due to severe technical issues we are unable to proceed with the DreamLeague Season 25 grand finals," a statement from the organizer read.

The reason: a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) attack, targeted mainly at Team Spirit players, as confirmed by the organization during the grand final. "We regret to announce that on the fourth map of the DreamLeague grand final we encountered a DDOS attack," Spirit said, adding the accounts of Magomed "Collapse" Khalilov and Denis "Larl" Sigitov were compromised.

DDOS attacks were common with unprotected networks in the 2000's and 2010's, but as network security has improved and most competition switched to closed LAN play, such incidents were all but extinct.

The players received a burst of party invites and messages through Steam according to Collapse, who posted on his Telegram account after the postponement was announced. "Dota was simply crashing due to the number of requests; the guy was throwing out invites to chat and parties at 100 per second," he said.

Collapse and Larl were able to switch accounts, but teammate Yaroslav "Miposhka" Naidenov began encountering the same issue. After hours of pauses and effort to fix the DDOS issue, ESL cut their losses and moved games four and five to March 4.

Reasons why Spirit players were targeted vary, but many fans assume gamblers and bettors were involved. An investigation has been opened into why Spirit players were targeted and to determine the source of the attacks.

The incident has spoiled an otherwise exciting day of DreamLeague Dota. Spirit fought off a brave PARIVISION in the lower bracket final, then opened the grand final with a 39 minute win over Tundra. The upper bracket winners bounced back in game two, before Spirit rebounded once more in a 72-kill, hour-long spectacular.

Game four struggled to get off the ground as the DDOS attacks began. Tundra support Martin "Saksa" Sazdov was particularly forthcoming with his frustration, messaging Spirit using the in-game chat. "Maybe Team Spirit should make sure [they] have DDOS protection in 2025," he said.

However, others have identified a flaw in Valve's Dota client surrounding mass invite and chat spam — an issue that stretches back years. It's not fully clear yet whether this is the case as Valve has remained silent on the incident.

ESL opted to pause game four for as many as three hours trying to fix Spirit's DreamLeague DDOS attack, but no such fix was possible. "Unfortunate for everyone, and especially for the players," Tal "fly" Aizik said on X/Twitter. "Bo5's can be very momentum-based, so it's gonna be a completely different game when they play again."

Spirit and Tundra return to the server to wrap up DreamLeague S25 on Tuesday, March 4. For more Dota 2 news and coverage stay tuned to esports.gg.