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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.

idk about you but i did school work through the year and hung out with friends , and most ppl the last thing they want to do on break is spend every waking moment with their family who is only there for chirstmas and maybe a day or two after you talk as if everyone is fat and stupid and all they do is play games coming from someone on a gaming forum thats some pretty fucking high talk right there

If 2 days of down time from playing games really piss you off then I'm sorry you need to get a life lol

You have to think of it this way too. Some people don't have family or are socially awkward and videos games are their way of coping with it. Like when I was going through chemo, I didn't want to do anything because I was so sick and video games and talking to my friends kept my mind off of it.

Just saying

that i can understand but you can still play games off line you dont need psn or xblox live to play games besides destiny

Destiny is my bae <3 haha

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PSN is back online.

"Some latency may be experienced due to high volume. Should you continue to experience problems after PSN services are fully restored please refer to Contact Support"

Closed.