The best thing about winter break, when you’re a kid or a college student, is getting to abscond from all responsibilities and just play video games for weeks at a time, eating junk food and not showering while you pelt bosses with turtle shells or machine gun Nazis or whatever the latest fun thing to do in games is. However, with the rise of online gaming, all those brand new PS4s and XBox Ones are gathering dust, because the networks that drive online gaming are offline. Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s XBox Live are both experiencing DDoS attacks and have been offline or close enough to it for the last 30 hours.
The online outage is apparently a DDoS attack, in which computers flood the network to knock it offline, and it is apparently the work of the hacker group Lizard Squad, who have an awesome name and who previously knocked World of Warcraft and League of Legends offline. It also has nothing to do with The Interview, which Sony put into theaters and online after first pulling the release. The attack hit on Christmas, and continues to plague both networks today.
Tags: ddos, sony, playstation, playstation network, psn, playstation network offline, microsoft, xbox, xbox live, xbox live offline, microsoft and sony gaming networks offline, lizard squad, ddos attack, online gaming networks down