Xbox Live Downed By Lizard Squad

Microsoft’s Xbox Live gaming system continued to experience partial service in North America on Monday morning, several hours after an outage apparently caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

The hacking group known as Lizard Squad, which drew attention for downing Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) over Christmas, claimed responsibility for the outage, which reportedly began at around 4 a.m. GMT.

As of 10 a.m. GMT, the status panel for Microsoft’s online gaming platform showed that several services, including social networking services and core services, were still experiencing problems. Users also reported problems with logging in.

Lizard Squad said it was planning to attack the network, and posted the Twitter message “Xbox (360) Live #offline” shortly after the outage began. The incident was carried out in cooperation with fellow hacking group LNO (Like None Other), according to another Lizard Squad tweet.

The outage lasted about three hours and is now mostly resolved, according to Down Detector, which collates user reports.

White hat hackers Finest Squad said they had worked to help bring the system back online.

“Xbox should be fully restored in Europe. Xbox in America is at 73 percent,” the group wrote on Twitter at around 7 a.m. GMT.

Hacker feud

Finest Squad has feuded with Lizard Squad in the past, releasing identity information on Lizard Squad members following the December attacks.

A 22-year-old man linked with Lizard Squad was arrested in January for alleged PayPal fraud offences.

The group was also linked to a recent hack of the Malaysia Airlines website.

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