SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Sony’s PlayStation network remains offline in an outage that began as video game players unwrapped new consoles on Christmas.
Microsoft’s Xbox Live service, which had also gone down, is back online but the company website says some applications aren’t fully functioning.
A group calling itself Lizard Squad claimed responsibility on Twitter for causing the disruption by overwhelming the companies’ servers with a flood of Internet traffic.
A group that called itself Lizard Squad in August also took credit on Twitter for disrupting the PlayStation network and tweeted a report of a bomb on a plane carrying a Sony executive. The plane had to be diverted.
It’s unclear if these episodes are related to the recent hack of Sony’s movie division.