Gamers get back online after Christmas Day outages

A group called Lizard Squad, a name that has been linked to other assaults on Sony, Microsoft and other systems recently, claimed responsibility for what appeared to be a distributed denial of service attack.

The resultant outage began on Christmas Day and took down the two services, which have a combined 160 million customers. Users were unable to play games online and many reported being locked out of other services – such as on-demand entertainment apps – where a login was required.

According to Microsoft’s Xbox Live status page, the service was back up and running on Saturday 27 December, while Sony tweeted that “PS4, PS3, and Vita network services [were] gradually coming back online” that same morning.

Neither acknowledged that the outages were as a result of an attack by Lizard Squad or any other group.

Attacks

The group was believed to be behind attacks on both networks earlier in the year and an American Airlines flight was diverted after the group posted a message on Twitter claiming that there was a bomb on the plane on which Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley was travelling.

The attackers told Channel 4 News at the time that their attempts to blame Islamic State for those attacks was a ruse and denied links to the jihadist group.

Despite the restoration of Xbox Live, which has around 46 million users, and the Playstation Network, which has 110 million, some users remained upset. The outages occurred as many unwrapped new games on Christmas day. Others, however, directed their anger at the alleged attackers.

Publicity

The motive behind the alleged attack was not immediately clear. A Twitter account purportedly belonging to the group posted tweets asking other users for retweets in return for their ending the attack. That opened up the possibility that the primary motive was publicity.

But one of the alleged attackers suggested that the action was an attempt at pointing out flaws in the companies’ defences. “It’s just such a huge company, Microsoft… do you not think they should be able to prevent such an attack?”

“Is Christmas really about children playing with their new consoles, or playing with their new toys, or is it about them spending time with their families and celebrating Christmas?” the alleged Lizard Squad member – a 22-year-old who called himself Member Two – said during an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live.

Embarrassment

The attackers are believed to have flooded the two services with fake requests, making it almost impossible for genuine users to get through – referred to as a distributed denial of service attack.

The news provides further embarrassment for Sony, whose film production arm was the target of a high-profile hacking attack that the US government blamed on their North Korean counterparts. The hackers began releasing emails from Sony executives’ inboxes which prompted days of headlines across the world.

The firm then pulled its film The Interview – which imagines the assassination of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un – after the hack was followed by threats against cinemas due to show it, but later decided to release it online.

Neither Sony, nor Microsoft responded to requests for comment.