Xbox and Playstation Networks Both Go Down for Christmas

Thousands of people reported Christmas Day problems on the Xbox Live and Playstation gaming networks, as a band of hackers took gleeful credit. The networks, which allow users of the popular consoles to play the video games with a wider online community, first crashed on Wednesday evening and the problems persisted into Friday morning, enraging many users — but especially those powering-up new machines from Santa Claus.

A hacker group called "Lizard Squad" claimed responsibility, saying on Twitter that it toppled both networks with so-called distributed denial of service attacks. The tactic involves overwhelming Sony and Microsoft's servers with unexpected — and bogus — user traffic. "Jingle bells jingle bells xbox got ran," the group wrote on Twitter Thursday, adding a similar line about Sony. "oh my fun it is to troll of you morons ... hey!"

Xbox on Thursday said it was working to address the problem and investigating what caused it. Early Friday, a Tweet from the official Playstation support account said engineers still were working hard to resolve the problems and thanked users for their patience. Playstation is owned by Sony, the same company that released "The Interview" on Thursday. Xbox is owned by Microsoft, one of the companies which agreed the stream the film despite threats of a 9/11-style attack by the original hackers. There were no immediate indications the incidents were related.