PSN down for PS4 — Lizard Squad claims responsibility

Updated on Saturday at 1:30 p.m. Pacific with Sony’s comments on the alleged attack.

You may have trouble playing online and accessing some features on PlayStation Network today.

PSN is down for many people on one of the biggest days for gaming of the year. A group of cyberattackers on Twitter called Lizard Squad, which has previously taken responsibility for bringing down other gaming services, says that it is the reason you are having problems with Sony’s service. If Lizard Squad is attacking PSN, then it is likely using a distributed denial-of-service attack, which overwhelms online servers with nonsense data. Sony has now confirmed that a “designed” disruption is the cause, which suggests that Lizard Squad really is to blame.

We’ve contacted Sony for comment, and we’ll update this article with any new information.

Sony’s status website says that PSN is still online, but it often takes the company some time to update that with any problems.

Christmas Day is huge for gaming as people spend most of the day inside playing with new hardware and software they just received as presents. That load of people is often enough to slow or take down gaming services on its own even without a malicious attack.

This isn’t the first gaming service to go down this year as the result of a DDOS attack. Lizard Squad has taken credit for knocking League of Legends, World of Warcraft, and more offline over the last several months.

The group is also taking responsibility for shutting down Xbox Live today.

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