Hypixel

Hypixel, officially the Hypixel Network, is a Minecraft minigame server released on April 13, 2013, by Simon "Hypixel" Collins-Laflamme and Philippe Touchette, and is managed by Hypixel Inc. Hypixel is only available on the Java Edition of Minecraft, but was formerly available on the Bedrock Edition of the game as well. Hypixel has held four Guinness World Records and is widely considered to be the largest currently-active Minecraft server, with over 100,000 unique players concurrently online during peak hours.

History
The Hypixel server was released in beta on April 13, 2013, by Simon Collins-Laflamme, whose username is Hypixel, and Philippe Touchette. The two originally created Minecraft adventure maps together and uploaded trailers to their YouTube channel. The Hypixel server was created to play and further showcase these maps. Minigames were originally created for users to play on while waiting for other players, but the minigames themselves gained popularity on their own and became the server's main identity, and efforts from Hypixel were put towards new server content instead of the making of other Minecraft maps and games. In 2015, it was revealed that the server cost around $100,000 a month to maintain, back when the server had around 16,000 players online. As of April 2021, the server regularly reaches over 150,000 concurrent players, peaking at over 216,000 on April 16. On December 21, 2016, Hypixel reached 10 million unique players in total, and had reached 14.1 million unique players by the time Hytale was announced on December 13, 2018. The server reached 18 million unique players in April 2020, according to a tweet by the server owner. Hypixel attracts 1.9 million players every month.

Around April 2018, Hypixel began to use Cloudflare Spectrum as a DDoS protection after being the victim of multiple attacks hosted by Mirai against the server.

Hypixel China
In May 2017, Hypixel partnered with NetEase, the publisher of Minecraft China, to release a version of Hypixel in China, sometimes known as "Chypixel". This separate version of Minecraft and the Hypixel Minecraft server would be operated and translated by NetEase, as part of their partnership.

On April 13, 2020, NetEase announced that the Chinese version of the server would be shutting down on June 30, 2020, due to the expiration of the agreement.

Gameplay
Hypixel has various multiplayer minigames created by modifying and repurposing the game mechanics of Minecraft. The server tries to find players that are cheating, or hacking, in its games using an anticheat called "Watchdog". Players can purchase cosmetics and ranks that allow for certain abilities, like flying in lobbies.

Guinness World Records
On October 20, 2017, Hypixel announced that they held four Guinness World Records.