Gamers visit the PlayStation booth during a video game conference. (Photo : Reuters)
Thousands of enraged PlayStation and Xbox Live users reported problems on Christmas Day. These two gaming networks enable popular console users to play the video games with a wider online community.
On the evening before Christmas Day, both PlayStation and Xbox Live crashed and the problems persisted into Christmas Day. The Lizard Squad hacker group took to Twitter to claim responsibility writing, "Jingle bells jingle bells xbox got ran. oh my fun it is to troll of you morons ... hey!"
The hackers said they used so-called distributed denial of service attacks to topple PlayStation and Xbox Live networks, which involves overwhelming Sony and Microsoft's servers with unpredicted and phony user traffic.
Both networks responded on Christmas Day saying they were investigating while working on the problems.
PlayStation took to Twitter announcing that they are "still looking into the PSN (PlayStation Network) issues reported earlier."
"Thanks again for your continued patience today," PlayStation wrote.
Xbox sent a message to their users on their website saying, "Hi Xbox members. Are you having a rough time signing in to Xbox Live? We're working to get this figured out right away. We appreciate your patience. We'll post an update right here in a half hour."
Sony, the owner of PlayStation, has also released its controversial film "The Interview" on Christmas Day after the company suffered cyber-attack reportedly by hackers with ties to North Korea, NBC reported.
On the other hand, Xbox owner Microsoft is one of the companies that agreed to stream "The Interview."
It is yet to be confirmed if the incidents of cyber-attack are related.
