After a significant disruption to the Playstation Network in which it was DDoS’d and brought down for the entirety of the day (August 24), service was finally returned early this morning. It was confirmed by Sony in their official Playstation blog that no personal information was compromised during the attack.
The hackers dubbed “Lizardsquad” have taken responsibility for multiple attacks against videogame servers and (oddly) the Vatican City’s official website. Blizzard’s servers (World of Warcraft & Diablo III), Path of Exile, Jagex games, and League of Legends have all experienced problems due to Lizardsquad’s intrusion.
Lizardsquad had escalated things to an extremely worrisome level where at one point they issued a bomb threat to the American Airlines flight carrying Playstation Online President John Smedley.
After Smedley’s flight was redirected they referenced the 9/11 attacks and have consistently related themselves to ISIS, though their actual relation to them seems rather unlikely.
The plane is currently grounded and the FBI are investigating the incident.
While it seems the Playstation Network is up and the Playstation Online president is safe, the same hackers that attacked Sony’s online service is now taking credit for issues currently impacting Xbox Live.
It’s been reported that party chat in Diablo III on Xbox One has had some connection problems and general server unavailability for Xbox Live is occurring as well. It is not currently known whether the current problems are actually due to Lizardsquad or not, but they are taking credit for it anyway.
We hear there are some Xbox Live issues, sorry :P
— Lizard Squad (@LizardSquad) August 25, 2014
(The Playstation Blog's official report)