Reports have been flowing in on Twitter today that Xbox Live and PlayStation Network — the online services connecting Microsoft’s and Sony’s game consoles — are experiencing outages. Occasional downtime is par for the course for both, but Christmas Day is a particularly bad time, just as hundreds of thousands of PlayStation 4s and Xbox Ones are unwrapped and set up.
We’re aware that some users are having issues logging into PSN – engineers are investigating
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) December 25, 2014
As Polygon reported, a hacker group identifying itself as Lizard Squad had previously promised to take down the services today. The group is taking credit for the outages, but neither Microsoft nor Sony have confirmed the nature of their problems. It’s possible that the networks are just straining under the load of the new consoles gifted over the last several hours.
Microsoft’s Xbox.com isn’t currently loading at all; Sony’s PSN status page indicates that the service is online, but an earlier tweet indicated that some users were having problems and that engineers were investigating.
Source: The Verge