DDoS Attack Takes PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network Offline

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This article originally appeared at TheWHIR.

The PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network are now back online after a DDoS attack over the weekend.

In contrast to a major breach in 2011, PlayStation reports no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any personal user information being compromised.

“We will continue to work towards fixing this issue and hope to have our services up and running as soon as possible,” PlayStation noted in a message to customers. “We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.”

Due to the outage, the planned maintenance on Monday has been rescheduled indefinitely.

A group called “Lizard Squad” took responsibility for the DDoS attack, and also threatened on Twitter to blow up the American Airlines plane carrying Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley. The flight was diverted due to the potential risks.

Last year, PlayStation said Rackspace would be providing consulting and support for PlayStation’s OpenStack cloud.

PlayStation servers had been the subject of a security breach in April 2011 whichresulted in the company shutting down its PlayStation Network for weeks, and losing out on at least $171 million in revenue.

PlayStation, however, isn’t the only game network to suffer downtime. Late last year, Microsoft’s Xbox One gaming system release was marred by performance issueswhich Microsoft attributed to DNS issues outside of its own Windows Azure cloud platform.

Security and availability have been major concerns for online gaming services, which store customer payment information and process financial transactions. And while gaming services are far from essential, they are a popular way to unwind, and any disruption can be bound to frustrate users and see them go elsewhere.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/ddos-attack-takes-playstation-network-sony-entertainment-network-offline