Xbox Live and Playstation Network down on Christmas? |

Many people reported that the Xbox and PlayStation networks were either offline or slow on Christmas day. Customer service agents had no clue what was going on, saying that there was an issue with the unit itself or that they’re doing maintenance.

Sounds like a major production failure if something was wrong with a lot of units on Christmas day. Maintenance during Christmas? Of all days, why would you do maintenance on Christmas? A bunch of people unboxing their brand new consoles and they can’t even play them that same day? That would make a major disappointment for customers and seems like an illogical thing for a company to do on a day where a bunch of people would be unboxing and connecting for the first time. I wonder why the customer service agents didn’t see that it ended up being down.

Some people said that it’s was being hacked. It ended up being a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by a group called Lizard Squad where they sent massive amounts of illegitimate traffic to the servers of both Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s Playstation Network overloading their servers. Sorta like a virtual sit-in protest. No user data was stolen, but blocking the ability to access the servers.

The downtime started just hours after the Xbox Live started streaming the controversial film, “The Interview” that depicts the assassination of Kim Jong-un who is the leader of North Korea. It’s unfair to those people who just want to play and enjoy their day playing Xbox and PlayStation who had nothing to do with this movie.

As of now the attacks seemed to have died down but still seems a bit spotty. The reason for the attacks slowing down is that New Zealand based billionaire Kim Dotcom offered members of the group Lizard Squad, 3,000 vouchers for one year of 500GB of cloud storage on his platform valued at $99 each. This has helped stop the attacks but gamers are still reporting spotty service.

Now the only thing left to do is for the companies effected to add more network and server capacity to help fight off attacks like this.

Did you have any problems connecting on Christmas? Are you experiencing any issues currently connecting? Please let us know in the comments if you are still effected.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA