The Grinch stole online connectivity this year, it would seem. Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network have been hit with online issues, with each service taken offline in an apparent DDoS attack (distributed denial of service). The targeted attack began late in the evening on December 24 and continues today.
An inane hacking group called “Lizard Squad” is taking responsibility for the service problems and insisting that people RT their tweets before they’ll fix them. There’s no confirmation that this group is definitely responsible, but they’ve been teasing plans to screw up these networks for weeks. Lizard Squad is already infamous in the gaming world for its history of random attacks. This past August, it gained notoriety attacking Runescape and League of Legends, so this latest attack would be a continuation of its dipshit activities.
PlayStation Network services, including the Sony Network Entertainment website, are currently offline. Xbox Live services appear to be functioning in part on Xbox One and Xbox 360; however, some users are still reporting issues connecting to Xbox Live, playing games online and accessing cloud content – including any pinned games and apps. Sony and Microsoft have acknowledged the outages via their respective Twitter accounts.
“We are aware that some users are experiencing difficulty logging into the PSN. We will update this article with any changes that occur in regards to this issue. Thank you for your patience,” the PlayStation Network status page added. Sony’s service has been taken offline for maintenance. The Xbox Support Page notes a select number of apps are currently experiencing issues.
