  We discuss some recent results obtained in the study of strong
quark-antiquark interactions in the presence of intense external magnetic
fields by means of lattice QCD simulations. We confirm previous findings and
show that both at zero and finite temperature the external field induces
anisotropies in the static quark potential. An in-depth study suggests that the
effects are essentially due to the variation of the string tension whose
angular dependence can be nicely parametrized by the first allowed term in a
Fourier expansion. In the confined phase at high temperature, we observe that
the suppression of the string tension is enhanced as the strength of the
external field increases. Our results support the idea that the loss of
confining properties is the dominant effect related to the decrease of $T_c$ as
a function of $B$.
