We hope you weren’t planning to play many games online on Christmas. Xbox users in North America and Europe are having difficulties logging into Xbox Live today, and PlayStation owners are suffering similar problems. Some Internet troublemakers are claiming they knocked both offline. Bah humbug to this.
While most of our team are away from their consoles today, one of our reporters in California has been unable to connect their PS4 to any online services. No PlayStation Store. No multiplayer gaming. No screencap-sharing. Nothing. Logging into Xbox Live seems like a no-go as well. Even Xbox.com is chugging.
Here’s Microsoft’s Xbox Live status page, as of 1:45pm ET today:
As for Sony’s PlayStation Network?
We’re aware that some users are having issues logging into PSN – engineers are investigating
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) December 25, 2014
It’s unclear if these issues are due to the Christmas rush of people turning on new consoles and all trying to get them online or if these outages and slowdowns are the result of attacks. One group, Lizard Squad, has claimed responsibility for the Xbox and PSN outages today. They teased plans to do this for days, despite a rival group, The Finest, claiming they’d be able to stop them.
Back in September, Lizard Squad appeared to be responsible for diverting an American Airlines flight carrying Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley through a fake bomb scare.
We’ve reached out to reps from Sony and Microsoft to find out more about the outages, who they think is responsible and when they expect service to be restored. If they get back to us, we’ll update the story.
One bright spot: Nintendo’s online services appear to be working just fine. (And, no, that doesn’t mean we’re blaming Wario.)
Comments
11 responses to “Xbox Live And PlayStation Network Are Having Major Problems Today”
Could be the thousands of people who bought a console bundle for Xmas all trying to download their 40gb digital games.
If it is hacker shenanigans then those people won’t be having a great time right now.
Nintendo is /v/’s hero, that’s why it’s never hacked and why the user scores on metacritic are left alone by the sony/ms bitchfest.
Well it’s that or they just didn’t sell many…
Didn’t hackers promise a few weeks back that XBL would be getting a Christmas gift of being forced to be taken down for the day or some reason or another like that?
Yeah some group called Lizard or something said just a wait until Christmas for the big surprise. I think XBL and PSN are trying to play it call by saying engineers are investigating.
XBL seems to be slowly coming back online,
Im able to login and start downloading now 🙂 Still no/limited friends lists tho
Yeah it’s a bunch of f*cking arse – PSN was offline last night, couldn’t play GTA Online. Lucky I’m working through single player again on PS4
I bought Sunset overdrive today on Xbox one and it won’t let me play at all, and all I want is the campaign. fuck the hackers and fuck Microsoft.
of course this happens on the the one time of year i actually have holidays -_-
Hackers are dickheads but I’m more pissed at Ubisoft because I can’t play Far Cry 4 without having to log in. Fucking always online bullshit.
Funny thing is that they haven’t actually ‘hacked’ anything. Rather, they’ve just conducted a massive DDoS attack that simply overloads and crashes their servers. Then they take to their twitter accounts and hold PSN/XBL to ransom for retweets and followers promising to stop their DDoS attacks(of which they have no intention of doing)
What’s scary is that Lizard Squad claimed a few weeks ago that they intend to take PSN/XBL offline permanently starting Christmas/Boxing day. Considering the servers have been down for almost a whole day now more or less tells me they plan to keep this up until gaming is thrown back into the dark ages.
…Which funny enough, many gamers seem to want anyways.
Lizard Squad took credit for the servers being down. For those not in the know, they’re a bunch of script kiddies who have previously launched DDoS attacks on gaming servers.
DDoS attacks can be done by anyone. You just download some software off the net and it automates the whole process for you. You just need to know the IP of the server you want to take down. That’s what makes these ass clowns merely wannabes.
Now for the other shoe: yes the servers are all seemingly back up. And who do we have to thank for this? Apparently none other than Kim Dotcom, who was so miffed by the whole debacle that he offered Lizard Squad 3000 Mega Premium account vouchers in exchange for the ass clowns stopping their attack. Lizard Squad complied and everyone is happy, right?
Wrong. I’m not. And any smart person can figure out why. There is a reason why certain governments don’t negotiate with terrorists: give in to them on one thing, and they’ll just ask for more the next time they make a threat. And so it goes with Lizard Squad. Now that this idiot has paid them off under the proviso that they do not attack XBL and PSN again, they now know that they may be able to hold other gaming networks (or whatever) for ransom and possibly get what they want. Who is next? Steam? Ubisoft? Origin? Nintendo?
And there’s this: what’s to stop LS from selling all their newly acquired vouchers on eBay and then attacking XBL and PSN again? If that happens, Kim Dotcom revokes the vouchers, but he will only be punishing the people who bought the vouchers off LS, not LS themselves.
Awww now i cant buy poop on the Playstation Store bunch of snarfs at least apple not 😛 Ipad all day