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Blizzard, PlayStation Network, and more under wide DDoS attack [Update: FBI now investigating]

A group of hackers have come forward and claimed responsibility for ongoing DDoS attack.

Ozzie Mejia

August 24, 2014 2:42 AM

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Update 6: All appears to be up and running. No further problems have been reported with PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Battle.net, or any of the other services affected. We will continue to monitor the situation here at Shacknews and will report on any further attacks.

Update 5: Battle.net has been hit once again, according to Blizzard customer service. The attack was foreshadowed when Lizard Squad pointed to a Twitch user playing Hearthstone. Minutes later, the group targeted a Dota 2 stream. A portion of Dota 2 servers have been affected, but there does not appear to be widespread outage at this time.

Update 4: Lizard Squad has now set their sights on Xbox Live. Xbox Support confirms that service has been affected.

Update 3:  A Sony Online Entertainment representative has issued a statement to Shacknews in regards to SOE President John Smedley having his flight diverted over a fake bomb threat. The statement reads "I can confirm that at this time the FBI is handling this directly." The rep added that no specifics could be offered, as this has now become a matter of national security.

Update 2:  An update has been posted on PlayStation.Blog confirming that no personal information has been stolen in these attacks. The DDoS attacks are persisting and the team is looking to resolve the matter as soon as possible.

Update: Sony has acknowledged the attacks on Twitter.

Network update: our engineers are aware of the issues and are working to resolve them. We'll keep you posted - sorry for the inconvenience

— PlayStation (@PlayStation) August 24, 2014

We are aware that PSN is currently down - please try again later. Thanks for your patience as we look into this!

— Ask PlayStation (@AskPlayStation) August 24, 2014

In addition, since the time of this post, Sony Online Entertainment's servers have been hit, as well. SOE President John Smedley confirmed the attack early Sunday morning.

We are under attack by a large scale ddos. Being dealt with but it will impact games until its handled.

— John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 24, 2014

The attacks have even gone beyond the realm of DDoS, as Lizard Squad targeted Smedley's San Diego-bound flight with a phony bomb threat. Smedley's flight was diverted to Phoenix for security reasons.

We will continue to issue updates as they come in.

Original story: Several gaming servers have been at the receiving end of DDoS attacks over the past several hours. Blizzard's Battle.net servers, Riot's League of Legends, Grinding Gear Games' Path of Exile, and PlayStation Network are among those under attack by a group of hackers calling themselves Lizard Squad.

Several tweets have gone up throughout Saturday evening, in which Lizard Squad has taken responsibility for the attacks. The group started with Blizzard's servers that include Hearthstone, Diablo 3, World of Warcraft and others. The group quickly spread to League of Legends and Path of Exile before deciding to spread their terror to PlayStation Network. The latter's outage is not related to the scheduled maintenance set to begin Monday morning.

The situation is ongoing, as the various staffs work hard to get the servers active again.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?