Update #3: Sony’s Sid Shuman has confirmed via the PS Blog that the FBI has begun an investigation. Additionally, he emphasized that no information has been compromised by these events, stating that “although this has impacted your ability to access our network and enjoy our services, no personal information has been accessed.”
Update #2: John Smedley, head of Sony Online Entertainment, has had his American Airlines flight rerouted due to information suggesting that explosives may be on board. He shared this information in several posts on Twitter.
Here is a threat from the group of people responsible for today’d DDoS attacks:
@AmericanAir We have been receiving reports that @j_smedley’s plane #362 from DFW to SAN has explosives on-board, please look into this.
This has gone way too far. We hope these hateful people are caught quickly without anyone being harmed. Here are a couple other tweets to give you an idea of how sick and twisted these guys are:
Today we planted the ISIS flag on @Sony’s servers #ISIS #jihad
alsa.org #offline, I’d rather they just gave up and stopped wasting money on people who are gonna die anyways. RIP economy.
Update #1: It is now 1:21PM PST, and PSN in particular is still having serious problems. The service has been taken down a couple times for maintenance for most of the morning.
Although to many this is reason to turn off the gaming devices and go outside, I need to review inFamous: First Light. The review code didn’t go live until this morning, and I’ve been unable to get onto the PS Store to download it.. This could cause a delay in our review, which was previously aimed to be published at embargo Tuesday morning.
Original Story: If you’ve tried to play online games on Sony’s PSN, Blizzard’s Battle.net, or EA’s Origin during the past 16 hours or so, chances are you’ve experienced major issues with connectivity. You have a DDoS attack to thank for that.
Last night I returned to World of Warcraft for my first time in about half a year, quickly finding that the game was nearly unplayable. Not only did it take me several tries to make a new character, but interactions were delayed, and eventually the server crashed.
I’m not the only one. It has been confirmed that PSN, Battle.net, Origin, and possibly other gaming services have been the target of a major DDoS attack. You can see the attacks live via IPViking.
DDoS stands for distributed denial of service, which basically means that someone or a group of people flood traffic to servers using a variety of methods in order to overwhelm them, causing crashes and other issues that affect the end user experience.
Also See: WildStar Hit By DDoS Attacks on Launch Day
A hacker group called the Lizard Squad have claimed credit for the hackings. They say these attacks are in protest of business practices that they deem “unacceptable”, particularly de-emphasizing consumers in order to make more money.
One of its latest Tweets says the following:
Sony, yet another large company, but they aren’t spending the waves of cash they obtain on their customers’ PSN service. End the greed.
All three services are still experiencing issues as of 7:55AM PST on August 24th. For players trying to enjoy online-only games like Diablo 3, it poses a frustrating problem. In the case of PSN, Sony has brought the service down a day before scheduled maintenance in order to address the issue. Some DDoS attacks take hours to fix, so hope for the best, but expect the worst.
