The Hypixel Heist

The Hypixel Heist was an event in which 6 players crashed the largest server in the world, Hypixel.
== The Story ==
My name is Jake, and everything I’m about to tell you is nothing short of unimaginable. Beyond belief, to an extent. So far-fetched that I still have trouble recalling a few of these events. (Luckily, my friends filled in most of what I had missed). You’re familiar with Hypixel, right? I hope so. It’s the most popular Minecraft server of all time, and for good reason. When I was younger, I used to play for hours on end, grinding on BedWars and SkyWars almost every day. What can I say, it was super fun. But what I had always wanted was a Minecraft server of my own.
Anyways, I took a break from Minecraft for a couple of years, but came back when 2022 rolled around. I hopped on some of my old favorite servers, including a little-known server called Blockerton. To my surprise, my old survival base was still there—and ungriefed. A few minutes later, the server started to lag out tremendously. And when I say lag out, I mean completely freeze. I had never seen anything like it before. Soon enough, the players from the survival world were kicked back to the hub server, signifying a crash.
Players in chat immediately started suspecting an intentional lag-out, and that was when one of the server’s moderators, Dan, joined to see what was the matter. He was quite irritated, and rightfully so. He commenced a rollback on the survival world to locate the perpetrator, eventually picking out a player known as AshCash32. This player seemed oblivious to the situation, running around in circles around the lobby area.
“This guy? You’re joking,” I said in the chat. “He’s just some Steve.”
“He ain’t no Steve,” Dan quickly replied. “He’s Asher, the crasher. You’ve never seen his YouTube videos?”
“No..?”
“Well… he likes going on specific servers with the goal of crashing them, forcing them to comply with his requests.”
“Well then… what does he want?”
“Uh…”
Dan immediately flew over to Asher, banning him followed by a permanent IP-ban. “I don’t know,” he vehemently replied. “I just don’t know.”
I curiously opened a new tab in my internet browser, looking up Asher’s channel. Sure enough, his video catalog was packed full of various server crashes. Wanting to know more, I got my hands on his Discord username and sent him some messages. Surprisingly, he was really friendly, and informed me that the servers that he targets are “pay-to-win,” meaning that they give paying players unfair advantages to non-paying players.
“Sounds reasonable,” I messaged.
“Yeah, that’s why I do it,” he replied. “Makes me feel like a superhero of sorts, taking down the baddies one by one. But it’s quite difficult planning everything out myself.”
“You act alone?” I asked him.
“You sound surprised,” he said with a pause before continuing. “Most of my friends think I’m wasting my time with this. They make some good points, but…”
“I’ll join you,” I said without second thought.
“Huh?”
“I can help out. My services are yours.”
“You want to help me crash servers?”
“It seems like a great experience. I want to learn how you do it.”
“Okay then,” Asher said. I could tell he was a bit shocked. “Well… your first day on the job is tomorrow, I guess.”
I looked over at the clock in the bottom-right-hand corner of the screen—11:52 at night. “Better get some sleep,” I said. That wouldn’t happen for another three hours. Yeah…
I found myself unable to fall asleep, as I was constantly thinking about everything that had happened earlier.
Eventually, I woke up with a slight glimmer of sunlight on my head, and I rose out of my bed and instantly dashed toward my computer. I booted it up, opened Discord, and saw that Asher was online, and had already sent me a message.
“I have a server for you to join. Meet me there.”
He attached the IP address of a server called “DiamondCraft.” As instructed, I joined the server and was promptly teleported to Asher’s location. I got in a voice call with him.
“You’re familiar with this place, right?” he asked me.
“Of course,” I responded, “it’s only the second-biggest server in the game.”
“That’s right,” Asher said. “It also happens to sell virtual crates for real-world money on their server store.”
“What’s in the crates?”
Asher started laughing. “Just scroll through their website! It’s insane how overpowered they are.”
I opened a link to the DiamondCraft server store and took a look for myself. “100 dollars for full netherite gear?” I exclaimed.
“That’s not all,” Asher said. “Keep going.”
“Flight… access to all warps… upwards of fifty homes… limited admin powers?! This is beyond ridiculous. I don’t know how I had never noticed them.”
“Well, we’re here now,” Asher said. “And for once, we get to do something about it.”
We made our way over to a secluded region of the survival world, and that was when Asher sent me a schematic file on Discord.
“A lag machine,” I said. Asher started building, and I followed suit. Within thirty minutes, it was finished.
“Go ahead,” Asher told me, gesturing toward a lever. As I pulled it, the server started to lag like mad. It was even worse than the Blockerton crash. Within seconds, the survival world crashed, and the players were kicked back to the lobby server.
“Works every time,” Asher said triumphantly.
“Impressive,” I said.
Suddenly, the owner joined the server. “Yeah, this is getting old,” she said in the chat.
“Your crates are getting old,” Asher responded. “Remove them, or we’ll keep having a problem.”
The owner, who introduced herself as Brynn, teleported both Asher and me to a small house overlooking the lobby. “I guess we can make a deal,” she said.
“Perfect,” Asher said. “What do you have in mind?”
“I’ll remove the crates,” she started. “But you have to carry out something for me.”
“We’ll do anything,” I chimed in. “Just get rid of the crates.”
Jake! Asher said to me in a private message. Let’s not get too in over our heads at the moment, okay? Let’s just see what she wants.
“What do you want us to do?” I asked Brynn.
“Well, it’s not easy, that’s for sure,” she said. “You know Hypixel? I need you to obliterate it. Eradicate it with everything you got.”
“Woah, woah, woah,” I said, taken aback. “Why in the world would we want to crash Hypixel?!”
“You haven’t heard the news?” Brynn asked. “The Hypixel admins recently introduced new ranks, that you could say are… pay-to-win, as you call it?”
“I… didn’t know,” I replied.
“Well, that gives you the incentive. Hypixel is my biggest competitor, you know. Once it loses, everyone else wins. Pull off the heist, and I’ll remove the crates… in addition to taking both of you off of Mojang’s blacklist.”
“What blacklist?” Asher exclaimed.
“Well, they happen to dislike your actions. Even though you may think it’s heroic, they see it as disruptive. So, they put you on a blacklist to prevent you from owning servers.”
“Seriously?!” I yelled. “Making my own server has been my dream for quite a while now… and…”
“I can help you make it happen,” Brynn said. “I have a few connections within Mojang—so if you complete this task, you’ll be removed from the list.”
“We have to do this,” I told Asher. “But I can understand if you don’t—”
“You won’t get very far without my help,” Asher said. “I’ve got your back. But it would be quite a struggle with just the two of us…”
“We need more people,” I said. “And I think I know who to ask.”
Asher and I left the DiamondCraft server and joined a different server called StarBlocks. It was rather complex as compared to most other servers, as it used several custom plugins that were developed by the two lead programmers.
“Here they are,” I said to Asher. “Meet Yohannes and Ronnie. The two best programmers I know.”
“Nice to meet you,” Asher said. “Jake told me that your skills could be useful for our mission…”
“Hacking Hypixel?” Yohannes instantly said. “I’ve always wanted to do that. I’m in.”
Ronnie slowly turned around to face his co-developer, seemingly with a face of concern.
“Uh,” he said. “Guess that means I’m also in. But Yohannes, we need to talk about this later.”
“What do you need us for?” Yohannes asked me.
“We need your expertise,” I said. “You guys have made so many custom plugins and mods… at least some of them should help us crash the server.”
“Do you use lag machines?” Ronnie questioned.
“Yeah,” Asher replied. “It takes a while to build, though.”
“I think I have a mod to help with that,” Yohannes added. “An instant-construction mod. Just paste in the schematic, and voila.”
“Nice,” I said. “That would give us a lot more time on our hands. But what do we do once the admins arrive?”
“How about taking advantage of fallback servers?” Ronnie said. “We shouldn’t crash all worlds at once… it would be way too exhausting and time-expensive. Additionally, the staff could commence a rollback anyway, making our troubles fruitless.”
“Fallback servers?” Asher asked. “As in… kicking the players from one server to another?”
“Exactly,” Yohannes said. “It should also create distractions for the staff team. Once they’re trying to solve the lag, we can backdoor the server, and breach the client.”
“Wait,” I interrupted, “I thought we were just crashing it. Why breach it?”
“To ensure that this never has to happen again,” Asher said. “Yohannes and Ronnie, you guys are hired.”
“Thanks,” Ronnie said. “But… there’s one thing. We don’t actually know how backdooring works. We’ve just heard of it.”
“So we’ll have to find someone else who knows how to do it?”
“Yeah. I suggest going on the deep web. But be careful.”
I opened up a new tab, and with Ronnie’s advice, opened up a search engine on the deep web. Honestly, I’ve never really explored this side of the internet before, so suffice to say, I was a bit nervous. I searched for general information about Minecraft backdooring, which didn’t really lead me to anything relevant. However, I soon came across a very interesting web page. I showed it to the others from a Discord screen share.
LIMBO
* I’m an expert in server-side hacking and breaching within the scope of Minecraft.
* $100 for one breach. Slow payment = your loss.
* You are not allowed to speak about my work in any public forum or server. You will be consequently terminated. I will not elaborate further.
“Any other listings?” Yohannes asked.
“Doesn’t seem like it,” I replied. “Looks like he’s our only shot.”
I paid him $100 via PayPal, attaching my Discord username. Within five seconds, I got a message from a user without a username.
“What’s up?”
“Hey, we need you for something important,” I messaged. “A team and I are planning on crashing Hypixel to combat their pay-to-win policies. We’re also planning on breaching their servers, but we aren’t experts in that field. Are you able to help us?”
“Hypixel, huh? Haha. Sounds fun. Let’s do it.”
He invited us 4 to join a random server in order to discuss the mission. “Let’s do DiamondCraft,” he said. “I have a small base on it where we can go through our plans.”
“DiamondCraft?” I asked. “Asher and I crashed it yesterday. I’m kinda curious to see what the owner’s up to now…”
As we joined, I noticed that the crates that were previously spammed throughout the lobby were now disabled. As I walked toward one of the crates, I noticed Brynn standing next to it.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“It’s really coming together,” I replied. “I think we have a good chance of pulling it off, especially with Limbo by our side.”
Suddenly, Limbo teleported me, Asher, Yohannes, and Ronnie to his base. It was quite impressive—a medieval-styled kingdom with neo-futuristic elements.
“Nice base,” I told him.
“Yeah, yeah. Alright, what have we got? What are our roles in this operation?”
“I’m pasting in a lag machine in the Hypixel hub using my plugin,” Yohannes said. “It’ll distract the staff team. Everyone else will join the SkyBlock world, while I stay behind to monitor the situation in the hub.”
“I’ll also paste a lag machine at the SkyBlock spawn once we join,” Asher added, “although a different version. If the staff removes the lag machine on either the hub or SkyBlock spawn, we’ll just regenerate the machine on the other one. Once the staff figures out that they can’t solve the problem, they’ll stop the server’s processes.”
“That’s when we have to join the fallback world,” Ronnie continued. “Jake, Limbo, and I will locate the internal files within the fallback, and Limbo will backdoor the server from there. If anything going wrong, like the server restarting prematurely, I’ll use my disguises plugin in order to make the admins believe that we’re Mojang employees, and that they should take no further action.”
“Sounds concise,” Limbo said. “I like it.”
“I like it too,” Brynn said.
“Wait, you were here the whole time?!” Limbo exclaimed.
“Of course. I set this whole thing in motion. It only makes sense that I see it through. I’m coming with you.”
“Sorry, we aren’t taking any tourists,” Asher said with an annoyed tone.
“We could use all the help we can get,” I told him, then turned toward Brynn. “Happy to have you join us.”
Asher gave me a glare of disapproval, but then nodded. “Well, you’re the leader,” he said.
“Is everyone ready?” I asked, eager to finally get started.
“Seems so,” Limbo said. “Let’s go.”
We all joined Hypixel within seconds, and immediately got to work. Yohannes used his schematic plugin to paste in a lag machine, and players already began feeling the effects.
“What’s with this frame rate?” one of them said in the chat. “It’s unplayable!”
The server’s TPS dropped below 5, and many players already either called it quits or had their games crash. Soon enough, a few members from Hypixel’s admin team arrived on the scene. 
“Lag machine,” said Frederickson, the lead admin. “Should be easy enough to get rid of.”
Yohannes gave the rest of us a thumbs-up, and we knew that it was go time. Or, more precisely, “get out” time. We quickly escaped to the SkyBlock world, and Asher used Yohannes’s plugin to paste in another lag machine near the spawn. “Alright guys,” he said. “Get to work. I’ll make sure nothing happens here at spawn.”
“Good luck,” I said before teleporting to Limbo, who had relocated onto a small SkyBlock island. Brynn and Ronnie were already waiting, and started the construction of an intricate command terminal. Limbo walked up to the command block in the center, and started typing in some code.
“We don’t have much time before the server closes,” Ronnie began. “Yohannes and Asher are doing a really good job confusing the admins. Check it out on Discord.”
Sure enough, the two of them sent some screenshots in the text channel.
“Looks to me like the admins keep flip-flopping between the worlds, and every time they destroy one of the lag machines, another one will generate. Heh.”
Limbo was furiously entering command after command into the terminal, I could tell from his focused demeanor. “Don’t bother me,” he said, “if you want me to finish in time.”
After around ten seconds, the command block exploded into pieces.
“Holy crap,” I muttered. “Did it just—”
“That’s what was supposed to happen,” Limbo said bitterly. “An explosion means that the fallback server’s up.”
“Phew,” I said. “Well, in that case, let’s keep going. What do—”
Suddenly, the server shut down. Seems like the admins finally got irritated enough to close it, I thought. As expected, Ronnie, Brynn, Limbo, and I were all relocated to a fallback server. The server’s world consisted of nothing but a floating island with a single house in the middle of a purple void. Limbo wasted no time finding the internal finals, activating his backdoor client in the process.
“It is working?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Limbo replied. “Just as long as they don’t restart the server, we’ll be—”
“Guys, we have a problem,” Asher interrupted. “They just restarted the server.”
I started freaking out, but realized that we had a backup plan for this very scenario, but it had to work. Or else we’d be doomed.
Ronnie jumped into the void, and was teleported back to the SkyBlock server. He used his mod to disguise himself as a Mojang employee, using another mod to teleport to the admins directly. Eventually, he caught sight of Simon himself, the owner of Hypixel.
“Find out what’s happening,” Simon told his admin team. “Because I have no clue.”
“I can tell you,” Ronnie said as he flew over toward Simon. “But the truth isn’t pretty.”
“Uh,” Simon stuttered. “Are you a Minecraft developer?”
“Yeah,” Ronnie said. “And you better shut up when I’m talking to you. You see, a few other developers and I are doing some slight maintenance work on your server. Nothing to be concerned about.”
“But wouldn’t they warn—”
“I SAID SHUT UP! Anyway, just stop what you’re doing. If you interfere with our work, then we’ll close your server. Have a good day!”
Ronnie then flew away from the admins, pretending to leave, but hid behind a tree to watch their conversation.
“Guess we just stay put,” Simon said. “Still a very strange occurrence, though…”
“It worked,” I told Limbo, as he continued to backdoor the server using his client. I looked back over to Ronnie’s screenshare.
“Maybe,” Simon began. “It’s too strange…”
Suddenly, Ronnie’s screen froze. “Guys, I can’t move my mouse. Or anything. What’s going on?”
Within a matter of seconds, Ronnie was teleported to a dark room. He was unable to see anything except for Simon standing in one of the corners.
“You’re no Minecraft developer,” Simon said, deactivating Ronnie’s plugin with his admin powers. “You’re here to breach my server. And I can’t let that happen.”
I felt my heart drop. Limbo uttered “Dang it!” as he realized what had just happened. I looked over at Brynn, who also had the same look of dread.
Almost instantly, the fallback island began to shake violently. Limbo looked at both of us before plunging himself into the void. I had no time to react before the void around me began to pulse a bright blue color, and default terrain began generating around me.
“What’s going on here?!” I exclaimed. No response. I noticed the remnants of the fallback island around me, but Brynn was nowhere to be found. I began to wander the desolate landscape, unaware if we were actually successful or not. Eventually, after what felt like hours, I located Brynn sitting on a cliff overlooking the sunset.
“It’s over,” she said without facing me. “We lost.”
“Maybe it is,” I replied. “But you remember our agreement, right? We still can’t give up, even after things get bleak. If you want to see them fall, then the time is now.”
She sighed and turned around. “I guess so,” she said with a smile. “There’s only one thing we can do now.”
“What is it?”
She slowly grabbed a hold of my hand, looked at me, and chucked me off the cliff. She followed suit as I yelled, “HOW IS THIS SUPPOSED TO—”
I found myself back in the SkyBlock world—but I wasn’t on the island. Instead, I was inside of a large floating bedrock prison. A few moments later, Brynn got teleported to the same location.
“What are we doing here?” she asked confusedly.
Without warning, Simon appeared in front of us. With the flick of a lever, he opened up a wall which revealed Asher, Yohannes, and Ronnie all suspended over a pool of lava in chains. Simon looked at me with a smirk, and said, “Game over, Jake. You and I both know that this has to come to an end.”
“Eat dirt!” I yelled at his face.
Simon sighed. “You don’t get it, do you?” He motioned over to Asher, Yohannes, and Ronnie.
“Don’t worry about us!” Yohannes said with a smile.
“NO! PLEASE WORRY ABOUT US!” Ronnie said, panicking.
“Where’s Limbo?” I asked.
“Oh!” Simon exclaimed. “Your deep-web hacker? He’s right here.” Simon teleported Limbo next to him. “Haha… I can’t believe it worked. After all this time.”
“Huh?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“Limbo here is with me. He set you guys up.”
“WHAT?!” I yelled, turning toward Limbo. “YOU’RE A TRAITOR! YOU SICK-MINDED—”
“Quiet,” Simon sternly uttered. “He proved to be quite useful. And Jake—there’s something you should know. Limbo—he’s not even human. He’s a program that I created.”
“There’s no way I’d believe you after all this,” I said to Simon. “Limbo’s more human than you’ll ever be.”
Out of rage, Simon flicked the lever, which caused a nearby redstone circuit to activate. The chains began to lower Asher, Yohannes, and Ronnie toward the molten fire below.
“STOP!” I yelled. I pulled out my diamond sword, and started to fight Simon. He was quite powerful, but with my hacks, I at least stood a chance. Brynn ran over to the lava pit and built a platform over it, freeing our trapped teammates shortly after.
“You’re no match for me,” Simon said. “Not in a million years.”
He kicked my diamond sword out of my hands, and sprinted toward me at top speed. He punched me toward a wall, and I could only watch as he approached, axe raised high above his head.
“Goodbye, Jake.”
I closed my eyes, expecting the worst, but nothing happened. As I opened my eyes, I noticed Simon with a netherite sword sticking through his chest. He dropped his axe, and fell to the ground. Limbo pulled the sword from out of his body, and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait,” I started, “you’re not a traitor?”
“Of course not. Simon’s my enemy. It’s been that way since the day I… well…”
“Is it true?”
“What?”
“Have you really been an AI this whole time?”
Limbo paused. After a few seconds, he said, “It’s true. I am the Lifelike Intelligent Minecraft Bot Operation (LIMBO). I was created by Simon and the Hypixel admins in order to provide players with a better and more interactive experience. However, I never got past the beta phase of testing due to the admins worrying that I became too lifelike and sentient. They feared that I might notice their wrongdoings, if that was to ever happen.”
“Like the new ranks?” I asked.
“Exactly,” he continued. “Afterwards, they decided to trap me in a fallback server. Unfortunately, they didn’t realize that the fallback server was connected to a client that allowed me to have full access to the internet. But I never told them.”
Brynn and the others made their way over to us. “Is the mission still on the table?” she asked.
Limbo nodded. “I managed to backdoor the server just moments before everything went south. The only thing left to do now is crash every single world we’ve been on so far. But what’s the most effective way to do that?”
“Explosives,” Yohannes said with a chuckle. “Stacks upon stacks of explosives.”
“Of course,” Limbo said. “Let’s get to work.”
Within seconds, we used Yohannes’s schematic mod to paste huge spheres of TNT all around the SkyBlock spawn. I ignited it with flint and steel, and after a few moments, the world crashed, and we were teleported back to the Hypixel hub.
“Is this the last one?” Ronnie asked.
“Yeah,” Asher said. “Let’s make it count.”
We placed even more massive spheres of TNT around the hub, and players in the chat were screaming out of confusion.
“Want to do the honors, Limbo?” I asked.
He smiled and pulled out a flint and steel. “It’s my pleasure.”
…
 [Could not connect to a default or fallback server, please try again later: io.netty.channel.ConnectTimeoutException]
…
A month had passed since what players now call the “Hypixel Heist.” However, the Hypixel admins tried their best to cover up everything about our mission, so most players haven’t even heard of it. Immediately after the breach, Hypixel removed all of their pay-to-win ranks, and all information regarding them. Since these ranks had only lasted 48 hours max, I doubt that most people reading this even recall them. But that’s why I’m here—to tell my story. And this story couldn’t be complete without those who made it happen.
Asher, as you could probably guess, continued his hobby of crashing pay-to-win servers. Even though the rest of us have since moved on to other things, he gathered a small team that helps him come up with exploits and locates unfair servers. His YouTube channel has grown since then, and he recently celebrated the 10,000 subscriber milestone. I’m proud of him, and I’m happy to call him my partner in crime.
Yohannes and Ronnie have decided to use their programs for good from now on. They told me that it was a joint agreement between the both of them (though I believe it’s just Ronnie telling Yohannes to stop being so chaotic.) They’ve recently started a shared internship with Mojang themselves, which is absolutely an achievement, but something I had thought would happen for quite a while now. Another point that proves they’re two of the best programmers in the world.
Brynn stayed true to our deal, and she managed to take me off of the global ban list. She also removed all of DiamondCraft’s crates, as well as using the server as a platform to condemn pay-to-win servers. With her help, I finally achieved my dream: creating my own server. I decided to name it LimboMC in honor of my good friend.
Oh yeah, about Limbo. I… actually haven’t heard from him much after the Heist. I believe he’s finding his own path, figuring out who he truly is—aside from his past with Hypixel. That’s great, and I hope he finally finds the light at the end of the tunnel. But what I know for sure is that he’s taking on anything that’s coming his way with a thorough outlook, and a lot of hacks. Can’t forget the hacks.
Anyway, this has been a long journey. A journey with twists and turns, that somehow made everyone involved into a better person—even Simon. I received an email from him a few days ago where he talked about the Heist. He told me that he respected what we did, and that he vowed to change for the greater good. Now that was something I didn’t expect, but hey, any good change is a welcome one by my standards.
My name is Jake Weatherton. Minecraft server owner and crasher. Heist leader. Admin beater.
Signing off.