Xbox Live Taken Down By Hacker Group

Lizard Squad, the group that has attacked PlayStation, Hearthstone, WoW, Destiny and others in the past, has now taken responsibility for bringing down Xbox Live functionality yesterday. Users had been reporting that Xbox Live was down as early as 8 AM on December 1st, with a self-reported confirmation by the hacker group at 8:37 PM EST last night.

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As of press time, most Xbox Live functionality seems to have been restored. This isn’t the first time that Lizard Squad has used an attack like this to bring down a games service similar to Xbox Live. PSN had also previously suffered a DDoS attack of a similar nature. To those who are uninformed on the matter, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is where an entity attempts to overload a 3rd-party’s servers with a great number of external requests, inevitably slowing down service to the point of performance failure.

Not being able to play online games properly was already an issue enough for Halo: The Master Chief Collection fans before the attacks, and everyone else using any sort of Xbox Live service (including billing, support, etc.) is affected. It’s an unfortunate trend to continue, and it’s outright shocking that the FBI has not managed to bring an end to their operations, even after previously having thought to have done just that. Let’s just hope we can get back to playing our games as soon as possible.

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