Since we were spending Christmas day with our loved ones, stuffing our faces with turkey and chocolate, and drinking until we fell asleep on the sofa in the evening, we’re a bit late with this news, but PSN and Xbox Live have been experiencing outages over Christmas, apparently due to “hacker” groups which we aren’t going to mention here.
Imagine spending Christmas day ruining it for many other people – we’ve seen reports of Disney Infinity and Skylanders not loading up due to needing a connection, day one patches not being able to be installed, and online multiplayer in games such as The Last of Us and Call of Duty not working.
Christmas is all about empathy, sharing, and a sense of community – something which these idiots have ruined for many. That’s if they have taken it down, and even if they have it’s a DDoS attack rather than a full-blown hack, so there’s no need to worry about your details.
For further updates, check the PSN status page – currently offline – and Xbox Live status page – currently limited in its services – as we’re going back to eating those turkey leftovers. We really hope you can get your gaming on soon.
duke
Apparently, they’re now concentrating their “skills” at bringing down the Tor network.
pdannysan13
I really feed bad for all the people out there, who couldn’t enjoy their gifts or couldn’t connect with loved ones.
I keep hoping that one day some genius kid gets irritated by these attacks and pledges to become the best anti-hack guy out there. And invents a better protection for all these systems.
homerjnick
Bit fed up with Anonymous and Finest Squad who claim to have helped restore XLive and PSN when in fact they haven’t…if you look at the map of DDoS attacks you will see some serious attacks going down…
But whilst we all agree this is pointless and is utter prickish of Lizard Squad to spoil Xmas for kids the point is DDoS can easily be avoided if you know what you are doing with your firewalls.
The fact that Sony & Microsoft are prone to these attacks given they charge for the service that is being attacked is mental…doing a DDoS attack takes no hacker skill whatsoever but the fact you can cripple two companies networks in this way is criminal…both Microsoft & Sony’s security/IT team need to look long and hard at their infrastructure if you can just blast traffic at them…
pdannysan13
I read this article on Kotaku: http://kotaku.com/hackers-explain-why-they-supposedly-took-down-psn-and-x-1675448709
I still say the guys we’re stupid for doing it…yet I sort of understand what they are trying to say. Still a douchebag move.
leeroye
Well 3 hours after sony say that the network is on its way back up i still cant get on. The communication coming from Sony is a joke. Nothing on their blogs or forums, instead they use twitter. Not all your customers are on twitter sony!!!
Smallville2106
Yep still not working for me. It’s silly really. Some of my digital games would not work without Internet connection for some reason. Also, trophy info seems to be unavailable without an Internet connection.
Cheesed off with the hackers but also with Sony. We have to have PS+ now to play online etc. £40 off millions of customers and stuff like this still happens. It’s been days, it’s not good enough.
This is one of the reasons that we are nowhere near ready for digital only. I know it’s the holiday period but Sony need to pull their fingers out!
lambchop
PSN is up for me now. Had a good bit of racing on Dvriveclub this morning
leeroye
Still down for me, this is getting stupid now sony.
lambchop
Possibly down again. I can’t get into the store again at the mo
Smallville2106
Anyone having any luck yet? Still not working at all for me.
element666
Still not working for me. No store,or friends list or trophy info.
So frustrating now.
Nate
The site states it should be working now but still no luck on my end. Would quite like to check in with Destiny at some point in my holiday!
anixan
Sony needs to start giving compensation to their customers for these outages! #psn #sonygiveback #psndown http://t.co/EJwpFsApWA
MrYd
Why do I get the feeling that petition was started by some XBox fans? With it’s ridiculous claim that the PSN has been down for 100 days in the past 6 months? That’s quite obviously total bollocks.
It was down for a few hours due to that incident in August, a few bits of scheduled maintenance since, and some time over christmas. The maintenance never really stops you doing anything except buying anything from the store. And the store is still not working from the christmas shenanigans (at least, not 100% working).
And yet people are still demanding compensation from Sony for something they really couldn’t do anything about.
What people really should be moaning about is the way Sony took lessons from MS this time and tied online gaming with the PS4 to PS+. If the PSN goes down, all your games go down. (Terrible images of a porn version of Bagpuss just popped into my head there!)
If it wasn’t tied to PS+, you’d still be able to play your games online, probably.
But no, let’s just whinge about something Sony couldn’t (and can’t in future) prevent and demand compensation.
anixan
Lol not at all, I am and have been a PlayStation supporter. As it says in the petition its likely the stats gathered are likely inflated and not all major outages. If you look at places like isitdown and other sources you can see the frequency of reports.
The point is if you are a PlayStation and PS+ owner you will know the pain of the servers going down on a regular basis and it seems to happen a lot during holidays and evenings/weekends in Europe anyway.
The point is when you continually pay for a service that is not delivered as a customer they should be compensating us for the trouble. We buy a service being promised something and if they don’t deliver its not our fault, hey if it was free we couldn’t complain but its not anymore so time to step up your game.
I can recall several occasions where so called maintenance has stopped me from playing games. And to say that Sony can’t stop people attacking them I agree, but they can ensure they have better DR processes in place and they should be using a ‘test to fail’ model for psn really as this type of thing will happen again.
The point is Sony need to understand that now online gaming is tightly coupled with PS+, a paid service, when customers are affected by outages they should be compensated for all the trouble.