Sony has appeared to admit for the first time that the disruption to its PlayStation network that ruined Christmas for untold children was the result of a cyberattack.
"The video game industry has been experiencing high levels of traffic designed to disrupt connectivity and online gameplay," Catherine Jensen, vice president of consumer experience, said in a blog post Saturday. "Multiple networks, including PSN, have been affected over the last 48 hours."
Sony and Microsoft, whose online network for its Xbox game system was similarly crippled by what hackers claimed was a targeted attack on Christmas Day, have declined to say what was behind the outage. But a "denial of service attack" that is sometimes used by hackers operates in the same way that Jensen described, by flooding networks with traffic.
A hacker group called "Lizard Squad" gleefully claimed responsibility for knocking the services offline, saying on Twitter on Thursday that it had overwhelmed Sony and Microsoft's servers with bogus user traffic. The service went down just before Christmas.
Microsoft restored its Xbox Live on Friday, and on Saturday Sony said service was still affected but progress was being made. "PSN engineers are working hard to restore full network access and online gameplay as quickly as possible," Jensen said in the post, adding, "Thanks again for your patience."
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