It was on Christmas Eve when we first reported that online gaming networks of both Sony and Microsoft were under attack. At the time PSN and Xbox Live were restored after a couple of hours but who knew that the attackers won’t sit still over Christmas.
Both services were knocked down on Christmas inconveniencing a lot of people who would have wanted to get some good gaming sessions in, it would have also been very agitating for people who received a new console over Christmas only to be denied the chance to get in on some multiplayer action with people around the world.
The agonizing wait for these services to come back online is finally over. Yesterday Microsoft confirmed that it had been able to bring Xbox Live back online, thus allowing gamers to play games on the internet once again.
Sony too updated its official blog to notify PlayStation Network users that they can start playing games online once again. The company revealed that its servers were hit with a distributed denial of service attack, a.k.a DDoS, which basically overloaded its equipment with “artificial” traffic.
A group that calls itself the Lizard Squad took credit for these attacks, late on Christmas day it announced that the attacks were being stopped apparently because Mega’s Kim Dotcom had given them gift cards worth a few hundred dollars to lay off of the gaming services.
Filed in . Read more about Cyberattack, Playstation Network and Sony.