Twitch restricts access from alternative browsers to stop bots

Streaming service Twitch restricts access from browsers other than Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. The Amazon subsidiary does this to be able to detect and block bots. Users of other browsers may not be able to log in.

twitch says that users who are having trouble logging in should use Edge, Firefox, or Chrome, while a chief executive of the service that this is a temporary measure. Twitch had to deal with malicious people who can create many accounts within a short time in order to start ‘hate raids’. In addition, bots spam the chat with a stream of hate messages.

Those accounts are created using alternative browsers, so Twitch is trying to address the problem by blocking those browsers and re-enabling them one at a time. It is unknown how long that process will take.

Number of newly created Twitch accounts, hate raids, September 2022