PlayStation Network Is Still Down And Nobody Knows Why

Since Wednesday afternoon, Sony’s PlayStation Network has been experiencing long periods of major outages across the globe.

But the group that claimed to be originally attacking those networks says it is no longer doing so. And yet, PlayStation Network is still down.

We’ve reached out to Sony and we’ll update the story if we learn more from the company. But here’s what we know so far:

• The original network outages were likely caused by massive distributed denial-of-service attacks, which overload servers with constant floods of bogus traffic. (Sony and Microsoft have yet to confirm this detail, however. Whenever these companies release their eventual statements, they will likely have much more to add, especially regarding future prevention.)

• A group of hackers known for DDoS attacking game networks in the past, “Lizard Squad,” has stepped up to claim responsibility for these attacks. In fact, the group was boasting them, tweeting about the event incessantly on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

• Kim Dotcom, the German-born internet entrepreneur currently residing in New Zealand, offered lifetime premium subscriptions to his new privacy file-sharing service, Mega, if the group would stop their attacks.

• The attacks stopped thereafter — but only for six hours. On Friday, the day after Christmas, Lizard Squad began the DDoS attacks again.

• But then they stopped altogether. Lizard Squad pledged it would accept Dotcom’s offer, and says it will never DDoS PlayStation Network and Xbox Live again.

• As of Saturday morning, Xbox Live was “limited,” but PlayStation Network was actually up for awhile. As of early Saturday afternoon, it’s back down. Sony offered this tweet:

We don’t want to speculate on what’s going on, but we plan on updating the story as soon as we learn more from Sony.

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