UPDATE 2: Sony’s published an official statement on PSN’s continuing outage, via PlayStation Blog:
The video game industry has been experiencing high levels of traffic designed to disrupt connectivity and online gameplay. Multiple networks, including PSN, have been affected over the last 48 hours. PSN engineers are working hard to restore full network access and online gameplay as quickly as possible.
The post goes on to note that those suffering from continued service issues should keep an eye on the @AskPlayStation Twitter feed.
UPDATE 1: Xbox Live appears to be largely back online now, with Microsoft’s status page tagging only IGN, Maxim, and MLG.tv apps as suffering from limited functionality. PlayStation Network continues to struggle, however.
Services started to return on Sony’s network in the early hours of Saturday morning, but the network status page currently shows it as offline. The AskPlayStation support feed on Twitter now notes that some issues persist as of 11:43am ET on Saturday.
We're aware that some users are experiencing sign-in issues on PS4 and PS3; engineers are investigating the cause.
— Ask PlayStation (@AskPlayStation) December 27, 2014
Stay tuned for more updates as we get them.
ORIGINAL POST: The PlayStation Network and Xbox Live online gaming services are taking Christmas Day off, it seems. Both are offline for some, if not all, players, according to the network status page for each service, as well as, of course, their respective Twitter feeds.
We're aware users are having issues logging into XBL & are actively working to resolve. Please visit http://t.co/99xfLNN0o8 for updates ^JX
— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) December 25, 2014
We are aware that some users are reporting issues accessing PSN this morning. Thanks for your patience as we investigate.
— Ask PlayStation (@AskPlayStation) December 25, 2014
Neither Microsoft nor Sony have a timetable for when each service will be fixed. The issue appears to affect all platforms in each company’s respective catalog.
Outages such as this are common on Christmas, a day when much of the world is home from work and, in lots of cases, setting up new consoles for the first time. There’s no indication here from either company as to the cause of the issues.
The hacker group Lizard Squad has taken credit for what many in the media suspect are denial-of-service attacks on each platform. Microsoft and Sony both have so far only acknowledged the problem, not the cause. Lizard Squad is one of several hacker groups that has proven itself capable of pulling off attacks on this scale in the past, but it’s also entirely possible that this crew is simply using the natural order of service outages on high-traffic holidays as a PR tool.
We’ll keep you posted on both of these outages as new developments emerge.
