Games By Russell Holly Aug. 25, 2014 2:45 pm
Over the weekend a group identifying themselves as Lizard Squad took a couple of popular games offline for brief periods of time. That group turned its attention to Sony’s PlayStation Network as well, and made things even worse by causing an airplane with Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley to land and check for explosives.
It would appear as though they are far from finished causing trouble, however, as the group is claiming responsibility for intermittent downtime and erratic behavior across Xbox Live right now.
It’s easy to jab Sony when the PlayStation Network goes down for any reason, because in the past reliability is not exactly one of the words most people would use to describe that online system. Over the last year, however, the online service has improved dramatically. Sony has handled the massive influx of paying customers from the PS4 incredibly well so far, with the only downtime to date being related to some of the biggest games being played all at once. Destiny, for example, caused some early problems that Sony quickly overcome.
What happened at the hands of Lizard Squad seems to have been resolved, but now that we see Microsoft experiencing the same issues it is difficult to say there was a ton Sony could have done to anticipate the attack.
Microsoft is currently asking users who are experiencing downtime to be patient while a solution is found, but notes that so far the problems seem to be temporary for most users. It looks as though a Denial of Service attack is being used to interrupt gamers as they attempt to access things like Party Chat and other Xbox Live reliant systems.
With any luck Microsoft will have this resolved in short order, though at that point Lizard Squad will simply move on to another target.
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It would appear as though they are far from finished causing trouble, however, as the group is claiming responsibility for intermittent downtime and erratic behavior across Xbox Live right now.
It’s easy to jab Sony when the PlayStation Network goes down for any reason, because in the past reliability is not exactly one of the words most people would use to describe that online system. Over the last year, however, the online service has improved dramatically. Sony has handled the massive influx of paying customers from the PS4 incredibly well so far, with the only downtime to date being related to some of the biggest games being played all at once. Destiny, for example, caused some early problems that Sony quickly overcome.
What happened at the hands of Lizard Squad seems to have been resolved, but now that we see Microsoft experiencing the same issues it is difficult to say there was a ton Sony could have done to anticipate the attack.
Microsoft is currently asking users who are experiencing downtime to be patient while a solution is found, but notes that so far the problems seem to be temporary for most users. It looks as though a Denial of Service attack is being used to interrupt gamers as they attempt to access things like Party Chat and other Xbox Live reliant systems.
With any luck Microsoft will have this resolved in short order, though at that point Lizard Squad will simply move on to another target.
More...
