Toy maker Funko’s AI system crashes the itch.io platform website

The platform for hosting indie games itch.io became unavailable for several hours on December 9 due to the actions of Funko, known as the manufacturer of the Funko Pop series of large-headed figurines.

Image source: Steam (Iblysi)

The administration of itch.io reported the incident. The site went down as a result of a complaint about one of the store pages from Funko’s intellectual property protection system, which is based on BrandShield’s AI.

«Funko literally took itch.io down because their junk AI brand protection from BrandShield generated a bogus phishing report for our registrar iwantmyname, which ignored our response and disabled the domain,” itch.io said.

Image source: Video Games Chronicle

The itch.io administration assured that they had hidden the problematic page a few days ago when they received the notification, but the iwantmyname automatic system worked before a live employee could read the report.

The wrath of the BrandShield system and suspicions of phishing were brought upon itself by a page created by an itch.io user for the platformer Funko Fusion, released in September, with screenshots from the game and links to the official website.

Image source: itch.io

A representative for iwantmyname, in a comment to Polygon, assured that the itch.io domain was restored after “the registrant finally responded to our notice and took appropriate action to resolve the issue.”

By now, the itch.io site is back to normal. The downtime period was about three hours, during which the service was unavailable to users, including gamers (the games themselves launched without problems) and developers.