Playstation Network was offline Friday for a second day in the wake of Christmas Day hacks of the online gaming network.
Playstation acknowledged that users of its network were still having trouble logging in and playing Friday morning. Both Playstation Network and XBox Live went down on Thursday, Christmas Day, in what is reported to be an attack from hackers.
The hacking collective called Lizard Squad claimed credit for the attacks on Twitter. Previously, Lizard Squad has claimed attacks on a number of high-profile sites, including the Vatican website in addition to those of other gaming networks and websites.
The Christmas Day attacks came as theatergoers attended screenings of “The Interview,” the film featuring the actors Seth Rogen and James Franco satirizing the North Korean argument that was previously pulled from theaters when its production company Sony Pictures Entertainment was itself the victim of a high-profile attack. Sony also owns Playstation.
Although Sony allowed for screenings of “The Interview” in some theaters and streamed it over the Internet, the episode raised awareness of the threats posed by cyberattacks. President Obama weighed in on the attacks personally, saying that the film should be shown and reprimanding Sony for not engaging the White House in its response to the cyberattack, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation has claimed was the work of the North Korean government.
Playstation said that its engineers are working to resolve the problems affecting its network.
Sony has not chalked the outage up to an attack, but Lizard Squad claimed that it was a successful Distributed Denial of Service hack, in which they overwhelmed the company’s servers with fake requests.
