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Christmas Coal Continues: PlayStation Network ‘No ETA’ For Return To Service, Sony Tweets – 3rd UPDATE


3Rd UPDATE 6:20 PM: Sony just posted on one of its main Twitter feeds, acknowledging that the PlayStation Network continues to be offline and that it has ‘no ETA’ for when the service will return to operation. Meanwhile, attacks appear to have renewed in the past two hours on Microsoft’s competing Xbox Live network. UPDATE: Five hours later, there has been little progress on the PSN front. “Our engineers are continuing to work hard to resolve the network issues users have experienced today,” AskPlayStation tweeted at 11:30 PM. “Thanks for your continued patience!”


The Internet-monitoring site DownDetector.com shows that there was a brief respite from the worst of the attack earlier this afternoon. The attacks started last night for several hours, eased off overnight and picked up again this morning. It appears to have picked back up again, and we’re seeing lots of complaints.

It’s likely another distributed denial-of-service attack (using a botnet to flood a site with tens of thousands of access requests, overwhelming servers), not the sort of hyper-sophisticated and in-depth attack that crippled Sony Pictures Entertainment last month. But Sony isn’t saying much as they deal with this, and gamers are getting frustrated.


There are also some Twitter posts by Lizard Squad, the anonymous hacker group that attacked Sony, offering Microsoft gift cards and selling Social Security numbers for two specific people for $500. The Microsoft competing online network Xbox Live was also down last night and has had some elevated levels of problems, but largely hasn’t been as crippled as PSN, at least until about two hours ago. According to DownDetector, complaints of service problems skyrocketed beginning around 4 pm ET and continue.

For those just wanting to watch The Interview – the controversial film believed at the heart of the original Sony hacking attack and possibly connected to the Lizard Squad attacks as well – another Sony outlet, the standalone website watchtheinterview.com, has managed to survive any attacks and is still making the film available to fans who want to watch it at home. That’s no consolation for gamers on PSN and Xbox Live who clearly, based on our voluminous comments, feel like collateral damage in this latest round of Christmastime assaults.

We’ll monitor as this goes on.

2ND UPDATE 5:20 PM: No official update from Sony’s PlayStation yet but things appear to be getting a little better as a number of PSN users tell Deadline that they have been able to get back online. The number of PSN problems detected by DownDetector.com dropped fivefold in the past hour, from over 5,000 to around 1,000. We will continue to monitor the situation.

1ST UPDATE, 9:18 AM: After recovering from a roughly six-hour outage last night, Sony’s PlayStation Network is back down again this morning, it appears. And the hacker collective claiming credit for the outage said it also has taken down rival Xbox Live network as well, though that couldn’t be verified.

PlayStation Network downdetector graphicComplaints logged at one system-monitoring company, DownDetector.com, show another big spike of problems on PSN, the online network, this morning. Attempts to access the network and the PlayStation Store directly also failed. (This is a graphic from downdetector.com.)

Sony’s PlayStation Twitter feed posted at 6:51 AM PT that, “We’re aware that some users are having issues logging into PSN – engineers are investigating.”

Xbox Live, the online network for video game archrival Microsoft, was spawning far fewer reports on DownDetector this morning after its own outage last night, but Lizard Squad, the anonymous hacker or group of hackers that claimed responsibility for the outages in posts on Twitter, said it had pulled down the Xbox network as well. DownDetector said problems spiked again this morning beginning at 7:47 AM PT.

The Xbox support Twitter feed was responding busily to lots of support issues but did not reflect an outage there.

PREVIOUSLY, 7:46 PM December 24: The PlayStation Network was down beginning in late afternoon, as attempts to access the site returned error messages that the network was down. A check of Internet monitoring sites showed thousands of complaints.

The hackers who attacked PlayStation parent Sony Pictures Entertainment last month had promised a “Christmas gift” if the company proceeded with the release of movie The Interview, which has been made available online ahead of a limited theatrical release, which starts tomorrow. PSN’s latest troubles might be related to the SPE hack. Business Insider was reporting that Microsoft’ Xbox Live network, which is selling/renting The Interview on demand, also was down. An anonymous hacker group called Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the outages in posts on Twitter. Lizard Squad also claimed credit for distributed denial-of-service attacks on the PlayStation Network in August and again in November.

See who cares if it's down. Spend time with your family or go outside

Also its not because of the movie the interview. Xbox was also down

Slowly the service is going to come back online, don't get the logic but whatever not much you can do.

If Lizard Squad is simply trying to prove a point, in that Sony's servers are vulnerable and they aren't using our money to fix it, they made their damn point. Let people back online. Stop ruining thousands of kid's Christmases. (and moreover, their parents.. Because the kids are bitching and its stressing their parents out)

I get the point they say they are trying to prove, but enough is enough.

Dude its xmas and the kids don't need to be on the ps4 or xbox they need to spend time with there family as they can play there games anytime after the holidays

do you think they really care?

You should watch the interview. They say they did this so on christmas kids, teens, adults can spend time with their families and not at a screen

I agree. Christmas is about family (realistically its about Jesus being born, but not all people are Catholic so I won't get into that) and the videogames and gifts you get can wait until the day after, but for many families, like mine, we don't have family come over until later afternoon into the evening. So we spend the morning with our new shiny toys. Also there are some families who simply spend Christmas alone. So you end up doing more harm in doing something like this than good.

Again I do agree Christmas is about spending time with family, but who are we (or who is LizardSquad) to decide for us what we will do. I like having the choice thank you.



No. Lol. But I can vent no?

I get that, and I agree with that aspect of it, but read my reply to skaterboy16