Consumers who opened new Playstation 4 or Xbox One consoles on Christmas Day were disappointed to discover both gaming networks were offline. A hacker group has claimed responsibility for bringing both networks down.
The situation has improved on Friday morning. Xbox live is up and running for the most part with “limited” functionality. Playstation’s network is still down.
With the networks down, players can play games offline but cannot connect to play with other users online. Microsoft and Sony have not yet said why the networks went down.
A hacker group called Lizard Squad took credit for the outages on Twitter, saying they were the result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, during which the hackers bombarded both networks with so much traffic that users could not connect, according to the Washington Post.
[quote text_size=”small” author=”– Lizard Squad” author_title=”Hacker group”]
I have the nation on strings.
[/quote]
Earlier this month, Lizard Squad claimed it hacked Sony’s Playstation Store in August, as well as online games League of Legends and World of Warcraft, according to USA Today.
Sony and Microsoft both expected heavy use of their networks from consumers receiving Playstation and Xbox consoles for the holidays. The issues may have been worsened by Sony’s decision to allow consumers to download the controversial film “The Interview” through Xbox Video and other sources, according to the Huffington Post.
Sony pulled the movie, which depicts a fictional assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, after U.S. authorities blamed North Korea for the cyberattack. The studio then decided to make the movie available to independent theaters on Christmas, and available for purchase and rental online through YouTube, Xbox Live and other services.
