The holiday excitement of online gamers was doused when Microsoft's Xbox Live and Sony's PlayStation Network suffered setbacks on Christmas day. The networks experienced crashes beginning Wednesday, which greatly annoyed many players, especially those who expected to enjoy their consoles as part of their holiday celebration.
NBC News reported that the notorious hacking group that calls itself "Lizard Squad" takes credit for the disruption, having used distributed denial of service to take down the sites, meaning the hackers flooded both gaming networks with fake user traffic. The group also reportedly posted a tweet Thursday, saying "jingle bells jingle bells xbox got ran, oh my fun it is to troll of you morons ... hey!"
Microsoft assures players on the official Xbox website that they are addressing the issue, saying, "Xbox members, are you experiencing issues when attempting to sign in? We're aware of this issue, and we're working to find a fix ASAP! We appreciate your patience in the meantime, and we encourage you to retry signing in when you get a chance. We'll update you as soon as we know more."
Likewise, PlayStation continues to update its users on the status of the network through posts on Twitter, including one that says, "We are aware that there have been issues reported with PSN. Thanks for your patience as we investigate."
This is not the first time that Lizard Squad had claimed responsibility for disrupting the two networks, not to mention other online games like "Destiny" and "Call of Duty." The hackers took down PlayStation back in August, and they also gave off a bomb scare on a plane that had Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley onboard. They lodged another attack on PSN earlier this month. Likewise, Xbox suffered the same fate early this December, and the hackers also gave a warning that it would make another attack on Christmas. However, neither Microsoft nor Sony had commented on the hacking group's claim.
