The owner of itch.io, Leaf Corcoran, provided a detailed comment regarding yesterday's website outages.
Funko Fusion
According to him, someone created a page on itch.io for a Funko video game titled Funko Fusion and added links to screenshots and the official website. The title was officially released in September.
BrandShield, a brand protection tool used by Funko, perceived this as a copyright infringement and potential fraud. However, instead of issuing a regular DMCA strike or warning, the program automatically generated a phishing report for the entire site.
Five or six days ago, Corcoran received notifications from his hosting provider (Linode) and domain registrar (iwantmyname). The developer immediately removed the game's page and blocked the related account to avoid issues.
Linode promptly reported the issue resolved, whereas iwantmyname ignored Corcoran's response. According to him, the registrar did not close the ticket, which led to the domain being automatically disabled. The creator of itch.io unsuccessfully attempted to contact the company, after which he decided to highlight the situation on social media.
Interestingly, representatives from iwantmyname shifted the blame onto Corcoran and stated that they restored the domain as soon as "the site owner responded to our notice and took the necessary actions to resolve the issue."
In their comment, Funko noted that they did not request the block of itch.io but merely attempted to remove the fake Funko Fusion page. The company did not issue an official apology. Meanwhile, Corcoran shared a screenshot on social media suggesting that Funko called his mother, inquiring about "incriminating statements" on social media. It is unclear how truthful this claim is.
"This is no joke, Funko just called my mom," Corcoran wrote on itch.io's social media
The developer still considers BrandShield the main "culprit" in the whole situation. It remains unknown whether itch.io will take any action against Funko and the owners of the protective software.