Thousands of video gamers had their Christmas Day fun ruined yesterday thanks to a bunch of mischievous hackers who contrived to knock out both Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service yesterday. Ho ho ho!

Even worse, it seems that neither service has quite managed to recover. While the PSN status page was claiming to be “online” earlier on Boxing Day morning, it’s currently listed as “Offline” at the time of writing. Meanwhile the PSN’s official Twitter support page tweeted that “Our engineers are continuing to work hard to resolve the network issues users have experienced today. Thanks for your continued patience!”

It’s a similar story for Xbox gamers – the Xbox Live status page currently says the service is “Limited”, and there have been numerous reports of gamers who’re unable to login and play the new video games Santa has delivered for them.

A hacking group known as the “Lizard Squad” is believed to be responsible for the outage – the group claims it took out both services and won’t stop until one of its rambling tweets is retweeted 10,000 times. The group says it’s taken the services offline with a good, old-fashioned Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which means flooding a network with more traffic than it’s designed to handle. In this particular case it looks like the Lizard Squad has targeted the PSN’s and Xbox Live’s login systems, as many users are claiming they’re unable to sign in.

We can’t confirm the Lizard Squad is responsible, but it seems to be the most credible suspect – after all, it’s been bragging of its plans to bring down both networks since early this month. This wouldn’t be the first time the Lizard Squad has targeted Sony either – it’s also thought to be responsible for a bomb scare that caused a plane carrying the president of Sony Online to be diverted last August. In the same month, it also claimed responsibility for PlayStation Network and Blizzard outages that took games like League of Legends and Path of Exile offline for several hours.

It isn’t immediately what the Lizard Squad has against Sony, but in any case it only heaps further embarassment on the Japanese firm, which is still smarting from the infamous hack on its systems by apparent North Korean sympathizers last month.

Slightly puzzling is that both networks are still having problems, even though file-sharing service Mega’s founder Kim Dotcom is claiming on Twitter that the Lizard Squad has now backed off. Dotcom posted a conversation between him and the group in which he reveals he paid a ‘ransom’ of 3,000 Mega premium accounts for the group to call off the attack. It could be that the continued outage is due to the ongoing work of Microsoft and Sony’s support teams, although this cannot be confirmed.

In the meantime, while Microsoft and Sony work to get their systems back online, gamers are forced to content themselves with offline play only, or – heaven forbid – put down their joypads and spend some quality time with the family :)

photo credit: stevendepolo via photopin cc