Electronic Arts said the problem experienced by its Scrabble application for Facebook on Tuesday was due to some unidentified hackers. Also on Tuesday, Scrabulous, which is a slightly differentiated version of the game, was blocked for North American visitors, because of a complaint its creators had received from Hasbro.

The legal situation with Scrabble is quite complicated; while its rights for North America are owned by Hasbro, for the rest of the world they belong to a company named Mattel. Back in January, Hasbro tried to eliminate its almost identical rival (Scrabulous). However, when this happened, more than 12,000 of the game’s fans began to put together an online movement - Save Scrabulous, in an attempt to convince Scrabble owners to keep the game on Facebook. Their main argument was that they had bought the original Scrabble game because of the online version they loved so much.

According to the Los Angeles Times, on Tuesday at 4 p.m., Scrabble still could not be accessed. That is when the company issued a statement which said: "EA's Scrabble Facebook game experienced a malicious attack this morning, resulting in the disabling of Scrabble on Facebook."

Whatever the hackers had done to the game was quite good, as the company hasn’t yet managed to make it work again, at least not until Wednesday morning.

The game, hugely popular with Facebook users (it reached the top ten most downloaded applications), was developed by brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla in Calcutta, India.