The group or individual responsible for taking down PlayStation Network, Battle.net, and other services earlier this year returned yet again on Monday. This time they turned their sites toward Xbox LIVE and briefly brought the service down, and threatened more for attacks for Christmas.
Update: Xbox LIVE appears to be back up and functioning normally.
Original Story:
Xbox LIVE went down around 8 pm ET on Monday. The Lizard Squad posted the following tweet in response.
Xbox Live #offline
— Lizard Squad (@LizardPatrol) December 2, 2014
The attack caused Xbox Live to reach the number two trending spot on Twitter, as users noticed their inability to access all or parts of the service.
Xbox live just die?! — Cliff Bleszinski (@therealcliffyb) December 2, 2014
Apparently Xbox Live was DDOS-ed. Wonderful. Don’t people have better things to do than take down services/websites and cause trouble?
— Kdin Jenzen (@AH_Kdin) December 2, 2014
For those that don’t know, DDOS is short for Distributed Denial of Service. It’s a form of attack that floods a server with requests to the point that it cannot respond to legitimate requests by users. This is Lizard Squad’s favorite method of bringing down services as they’ve recently claimed to have brought down the MLG Columbus website as well as EA’s services and even Destiny and Grand Theft Auto V last week. Xbox 360 users appear to have been the most affected by the attack as Xbox One users were able to sign on, but couldn’t access their friends list. Meanwhile, the Xbox Support page was brought down in the attack too with the page displaying a runtime error when I tried to visit it for a status update. As of approximately 10 pm ET, Xbox One is still having trouble accessing friend’s lists, but I was able to get online with some games.
This appears to be the opening salvo from Lizard Squad, however. The group is promising more attacks on Xbox LIVE this holiday.
Just some preparation for Christmas. — Lizard Squad (@LizardPatrol) December 2, 2014
That’s a small dose of what’s to come on Christmas. #LizardSquad
— Lizard Squad (@LizardPatrol) December 2, 2014
They then followed up by noting that their attack on Sony was more disruptive.
Sony had it worse.
— Lizard Squad (@LizardPatrol) December 2, 2014
There appears to be no reason for the Lizard Squad’s attacks on Xbox LIVE, or the other services. They are not protesting anything, nor are they attached to any cause. As Michael Caine’s Alfred stated in The Dark Knight , some men just want to watch the world burn.
[Images via Xbox]