For people who just unwrapped some new Xbox or PlayStation games on Wednesday, some bad news: Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network are experiencing outages.
Connectivity has been on and off throughout the day, according to reports. Both PlayStation and Xbox have acknowledged that the networks are working through some problems.
We're aware users are having issues logging into XBL & are actively working to resolve. Please visit http://t.co/99xfLNN0o8 for updates ^JX— Xbox Support (1-5) (@XboxSupport) December 25, 2014
We're aware that some users are having issues logging into PSN - engineers are investigating— PlayStation (@PlayStation) December 25, 2014
As of 3:50 p.m. ET, the PlayStation Network is offline, according to Sony, and has been experiencing problems since around 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday, according to outage tracker Down Detector.
Xbox Live, meanwhile, has "limited" service, according to Microsoft. Connectivity issues for Xbox began around 6 p.m. ET, but they are far less severe than PlayStation's.
A hacker group called Lizard Squad is taking credit for the outages, saying denial of service attacks are what's taking the gaming networks down. Whether Lizard Squad is actually responsible for the outages is unconfirmed, but it all seems to be a part of a publicity stunt.
On Twitter, a Lizard Squad account -- and there are many, as they are routinely suspended -- is asking for retweets and followers in order for Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network to be restored.
5,000RTS and we will stop hitting the #Xbox live and #PSN servers— Lizard Squad (@FUCKCRUCIFIX) December 25, 2014
If this tweet gets 5k RTS within 2min, we will stop hitting #Xbox and #PSN GO!— Lizard Squad (@FUCKCRUCIFIX) December 25, 2014
The account has been tweeting similar messages for several hours. Lizard Squad has taken credit for many hacks in the past. In December alone, the group took responsibility for an hours-long PlayStation Network outage, as well as an Xbox hacking attack in early December.