Hackers didn’t forget about Microsoft.
After a rash of denial-of-service attacks took PlayStation Network, League of Legends, and other games offline over the weekend, Xbox Live is getting its own dose of problems. Microsoft is confirming that gamers are experiencing connectivity issues as well as difficulties connecting to party chat in certain games. As with the weekend attacks, the hacker group Lizard Squad is taking credit for the Xbox Live outage.
Microsoft posted the following update to its Xbox Live server-status site:
“Hi Xbox members. Are you having trouble connecting to Party Chat on Diablo III on Xbox One and Xbox 360? Additionally, Xbox One users, are you experiencing server unavailability issues? Us too, but we’re working alongside our partner to get these issues fixed ASAP! We’ll keep you posted when we have more information. In the meantime, thanks for staying patient.”
A distributed denial-of-service attack is when an individual or group uses a large network of computer to continuously overload a target server with connection requests. At its most reductive, the process simply has numerous machines refreshing a particular website over and over for an extended period of time. We’ve reached out to Microsoft to ask if it can confirm that it is under a DDoS attack, and we’ll update this post with any new information.
After suffering downtime from DDoS attacks yesterday, PSN, League of Legends, Blizzard’s PC games, and action role-player Path of Exile are all back online today.
In addition to those attacks, Lizard Squad also took credit for the bomb threat that forced an American Airlines flight bound for San Diego out of Dallas to reroute to Phoenix. The group claims it is doing this on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a Sunni Arab militant group in the Middle East that’s carved out what it says is a nation among Syria and Iraq. We’ve reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigations for more information about the alleged hacker group, and we’ll add more information as we get it.