Slashdot Mirror
Xbox Live and PlayStation Networks Downed By Apparent Attack
mrspoonsi writes Both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network [were] down this morning, apparently due to a denial-of-service attack. The notorious hacking group Lizard Squad — which already carried out earlier attacks on Microsoft and Sony — has claimed responsibility on Twitter for these latest outages. While the group's role in all of this remains unconfirmed, it's worth noting that the group threatened last week to take down Xbox Live and PSN, according to Business Insider. And again, Lizard Squad has already proven it can successfully pull off such attacks, not to mention other malicious pranks.
Whatever the cause, the timing is obviously terrible: Plenty of people surely received one of the two consoles as Christmas presents today, while many more gamers would have happily spent the afternoon in front of the TV. In the meantime, both Sony and Microsoft have acknowledged the problem, with Sony issuing a tweet and Microsoft posting a message on its support website: "We're working to address this as quickly as we possibly can," reads its status website. "Thanks for your patience, Xbox members." In an email, a Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment further or say when the company expects to restore service. We've also asked Sony to comment and will update this post if and when it does. The Xbox Live status page says service remains "limited," and the Playstation Network is listed as offline.
Whatever the cause, the timing is obviously terrible: Plenty of people surely received one of the two consoles as Christmas presents today, while many more gamers would have happily spent the afternoon in front of the TV. In the meantime, both Sony and Microsoft have acknowledged the problem, with Sony issuing a tweet and Microsoft posting a message on its support website: "We're working to address this as quickly as we possibly can," reads its status website. "Thanks for your patience, Xbox members." In an email, a Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment further or say when the company expects to restore service. We've also asked Sony to comment and will update this post if and when it does. The Xbox Live status page says service remains "limited," and the Playstation Network is listed as offline.
1.) North Korea (has cyber warfare caps)
2.) "new" Russia (has cyber warfare caps)
3.) The United States (has cyber warfare caps)
4.) The U.K. (has cyber warfare caps + someone chatted with offensive language insulting Prince Charles about buying female hygene products)
5.) just some non state hacking group (has cyber warfare caps)
6.) foreign -hacking- legion (everyone can by cyber warfare caps)
I think I will be right with at least one or two of the guesses!!
so you missed 1 of 3
.. because (Obama Voice On) "It's in the nations primary interest that the average hard working american can relax from his hard work."
(opium for the masses, xbox for americans)
If only the games for these systems didn't depend on Microsoft's and Sony's servers to be accessible for them to work. It's almost as if it's some kind of crazy DRM scheme.
Maybe eventually we will have the technology to make a console and games that don't depend on a server that is not in the purchasers control.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Its not just those networks though, they just happen to be the highest profile ones so they get reported. EA's battlefield servers also got ddos'd offline as well, and I figure probably some other high profile games. In BF4's instance its basically been taken down on all platforms, sony and MS's networks are down and on the PC side those got dos'd as well
That's crazy talk. We'll probably never master the time-machine technology required to go back a couple of decades and obtain samples of such systems for study!
It might not matter as much as some things, and it might not matter at all to you, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
Then you should have no problem if someone slapped you in the face, because there are starving children in Africa.
Hint: Problem X is worse than problem Y != Y is not a problem. I consider it a problem if people aren't able to really play the games they bought in some cases.
Isn't 'outage includes other gaming-related servers' ambiguous at best(an attacker hitting XBL and PSN wouldn't need to be a rocket surgeon to add a few other high profile gaming related services to the list, unlike an attacker hitting a single service using some tailored vulnerability) and actively evidence in favor of 'not really DDoS, just all the legitimate paying customers having a lot of new consoles and games and extra free time right now' at worst?
If the problem is under-provisioning, the expected symptoms would be broad-based DDoS-like outages among all popular gaming related infrastructure. If the problem is DDoS attacks, the expected symptoms would be comparatively dramatic havoc on targeted systems, no disruption elsewhere, with the number of targeted systems limited by the attacker's resources(and by how close to failure those target systems were running under holiday load).
Maybe eventually we will have the technology to make a console and games that don't depend on a server that is not in the purchasers control.
That's impossible. Everything has to be done in The Cloud, and must be a black box to the user. Anything else is pure heresy. Control in the user's hands? What are you smoking?
It's the amount!
people need a bit distraction, as they need sleep, but if you are distracted too much, you will get stressed and unable to focus on the real things.
You think about economy, even economy isn't a "real" problem, because it's a "virtual" ruleset that get's only real because a sufficient amount of people follows these rules.
well, we had bnetd back in the day... Thanks, Blizzard. I think for more people, though, if it's horked up accessing Netflix via their XBox or PS (because you have to "authenticate" to XBL or PSN first before using Netflix), that's gonna be a bigger pita. At least it is for me.
Short term annoyance only, I hope. C'mon, Microsoft. Is this only what we get for your $80 Billion cash on hand? Don't know what to say about Sony & PSN, except perhaps it's just a pathetic q.e.d.
The thing is, the game servers are just fine. If we didn't have to go through the Playstation Network we'd be playing the games right now. In fact, some of us were playing this morning after the attack occurred. But since we were already logged in we could keep playing. After the game servers went down for daily maintenance, and we then tried to log back in, did we realize there was a problem. This then brings up the big question: Why do Playstation users have to first get recognized by the PSN? It has been asked many times over the years with no good answer. When something like this occurs, why not just let us bypass the PSN and play the games. Yes, we won't be able to add money to our accounts, redeem codes, or buy updates. But so what. We'd still be able to play.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Not all console games are single player, twit.
They don't need to be. Being able to run your own servers would solve this problem most of the time. Sadly, what you get from greedy companies is just locked-down, DRM-infested proprietary software.
Ah, so you aren't surrounded by a set of kids all unhappy and whining cause they can't play with their new xbox etc.
With his attitude do you really think he's even had sex?
(that wasn't for money)
Nope. He does not need to worry about children.
You're right, the proper term is "Poetic justice."
These "hackers" just made Christmas a lot less Merry for many children that just got some nice new Christmas presents.
They've already made their point that they can bring down the gaming networks of two evil empires, they should just stop DOS attack and let the kids (and the not-so young gamers) have their fun on Christmas.
the "boo-hoo I have aspergers" defence.
Which will not work. I have Aspergers and know right from wrong. I too am fed up with idiots who have fun screwing up other people's fun. Go pick on another group.
Hmm... maybe it's just me, but I've been playing my Xbox One all morning (since 4:30am local time, actually. My usual work-day has me leaving the house at 5am, so this is normal for me). Guess at least one company didn't screw themselves over.
Why bother spending hundreds of thousands for servers who will only see utilization on launch day? By the time you're ready for another launch, the hardware will be obsolete. I had this same debate on battlenet when Blizzard launched the Hearthstone expansion and the massive load took their billing and account management servers offline. (Everything went back to normal within 24 hours)
Maybe you've heard of "the cloud"? It lets you do this nifty thing where you rent servers by the hour - quite cheaply, too. Other companies manage to handle holiday surges just fine. Need, say, an extra 1,000 servers for a day? Won't even be that expensive.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
... but I'm pretty sure that mindless packet floods still aren't 'hacking'.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Maybe it was Nintendo? ^.^
But they are NOT criticising, they are removing the rights of other people to play the game they bought.
They are saying that THEIR opinion is the ONLY opinion and they have the right to deny anyone else to ability to play the game they bought.
What you are suggesting is that it is OK to make your protest known to the government by burning down someone else house/ business after all this is what seems to happen. YOU have assumed that YOU have the right to create damage to innocent people who don't happen to share your world view. Perhaps Afroamerican protesters can go around burning down the properties of white people to voice their protest about the unfair/illegal treatment they receive.
YOUR criticisms can be voice online in forums, letters to new papers/gamers magazines, that is called free speech. You can write to the companies themselves, you can make submissions to government departments, you can even compete with your own product. But its not done this way is it, these "protesters" break into other peoples computers so they can hide and not be identified, thats not protest, thats cowardice.
In my opinion, the issue at hand is not whether this is a first-world problem or not; it's not the level of disruption. It's the fact that an organization, no matter the origin, both had the ability and will to adversely affect the normality of so many people's lives. This act of ability and resolve indicates both a lack of corporate and governmental defense against such attacks and a distinct lack of trepidation of reprisal. The latter is more disturbing than the former. The more often these various organizations are able to carry out these attacks without ramifications, the larger, bolder, and more frequent they will become, eventually hitting "things" that matter, things that have life or death ramifications. I realize that this may not be a popular opinion, but at its basic level, these organizations are criminal organizations. They are committing illegal acts. Blaming the victims and indirect victims for not building their houses out of brick instead of straw or because they are too first-world and should find real things to complain about is not germane. Criminals should be prosecuted vigorously by governments with resolve both to punish for past criminals acts as well as to provide a deterrent against future criminal acts. It is distinctly the lack of perceived ramifications for these actions because of lax policy that I find the most disturbing about this. Just one man's opinion.
Never say never. If you do, start your sampling with an IBM 5100. That'll be the best for debugging the big UNIX problem coming up in 2038. That model can read all the old IBM codes.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
The Panther Moderns strike again.
If you were given an Xbone for xmas you will not be playing anything today. It will take at LEAST 6 hours to update the box, then any game you buy will have a 20-40gb "patch" that will need to download.
It's the biggest SUCK there is about the Xbox One.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And yet you are on Slashdot instead of playing them. They're apparently not that great.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Decided to see if my Fallout New Vegas DLC I'd purchased a few years ago was bugfixed. It was not. The goal is 60 fps? Try 1 frame per minute, or less. grrr
// forgive me for enjoying the game, completing all side quests and the game before the DLC came out
/// Game is on craigslist, I'll never even start 2 of the 4 DLC I bought
//// Be a long time before Bethesda gets any money from me for anything
///// I'm on a PS3 YMMV
/ Seems if your save file is >10 meg you lose
Amen...
My kids got a PS4 for Christmas, they are 4, 6, and 9 years old, they just want to play some fun games like LEGO Batman 3 and Little Big Planet 3 (we got the Black Friday bundle with those games)
Yea, they'll live, they did other stuff instead, but this is really a dick thing to do.
I'll compare that to Sykrim on Steam. No internet connection means just not being able to sync character data with their server and not being able to get updates. So long as it's on the same computer you played it on last time a lack of connectivity is completely ignorable.
I think that's a far better approach than needing to log onto the server before you can play.
I can guarantee you that the last time I tried to start Steam without any network connectivity it tried to connect, couldn't, and refused to start in that state. That was a couple of years ago, but it definitely used to be the case that the only way to get Steam to go into offline mode is to already be online. So now whenever I get ready to leave for vacation I make sure to take the laptop offline.
Likewise when Steam was offline this weekend (and it was only down for like a half hour), I would start Steam, it would go to "Connecting...", it would fail, it would bring up the login window with an empty password, and that was that. No way to login, no way to switch to offline mode. So it's possible that it saw the working network connection and decided that since it couldn't contact the Steam servers it wouldn't go to "offline" but I most certainly couldn't do it while it was out. (I think Steam was out in a weird way where the update servers were up and a few game servers were up, but the authentication and store servers were down.)
But I can guarantee you that there was no way to get into offline mode at that time. I suppose I could have tried unplugging my Internet connection but why would I have tried that when it's their servers that are down, not my Internet?
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
If only the games for these systems didn't depend on Microsoft's and Sony's servers to be accessible for them to work. It's almost as if it's some kind of crazy DRM scheme.
Maybe eventually we will have the technology to make a console and games that don't depend on a server that is not in the purchasers control.
Well actually there is. It's called a non-online game and they have been around since the advent of computer/console games and there are more of them than on-line games.
Actually some on-line games may not require Microsoft or Sony systems however you are still dependent on your ISP and the site(s) that host the particular on-line game you want to play.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
That'll be the best for debugging the big UNIX problem coming up in 2038.
Ah you mean the 2^31 problem. Well in-case you have not noticed we do have 64 bit systems now so maybe in about 300 million years from now we may have another problem although I would assume by then we will have at the very least 128 bit machines and by the time we have a 2^127 problem our sun will be a while dwarf.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Unless something has changed since less than a week ago, if you try and connect to Steam while Steam is down for any reason (say, a DDOS attack, like in this article), you will fail to authenticate and be left in a "logged out" state. At that point there's no way to activate offline mode because you can't connect.
If you were already logged into Steam and attempt to "go offline" it will attempt to authenticate with the Steam servers, and again - if Steam is down, that's the end of that.
This happened less than a week ago. That's not misinformation, that was me trying to open Steam on Saturday to check out the holiday sale.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Curiously, Kim Dotcom saved the day: https://twitter.com/LizardMafi... https://twitter.com/KimDotcom
Do they need PSN to play those games?
I've played both Tomb Raider and GTA:V yesterday just fine without PSN connection.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
My PS4 games works fine without PSN connection.
As with your Skyrim, I can't synchronize save data or trophies. It's saved local untill servers are up, and obviously can't play multiplayer, but beyond that my games works just fine.
I even installed a new game without PSN connection, without any problems.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
If only the games for these systems didn't depend on Microsoft's and Sony's servers to be accessible for them to work. It's almost as if it's some kind of crazy DRM scheme.
They don't.
At least not any of those I have, they work just fine without PSN.
Even installed a game from disc without PSN validation.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
I've played on my PS4 most of yesterday without a hitch.
Sure, no multiplayer or any online functions, but my single player games worked fine.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
Out of interest, what happens if you play on a different computer to the one you were last logged in on? Obviously you character and progress will be at the last point it was online for, but now you have two different versions of the character and game world.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, a protest is basically a DDOS attack. A large number of people all go to the same place at the same time, preventing others using it. Roads get blocked, squares occupied. It's temporary and the area becomes useable again afterwards.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
might not be able to start steam, however you can run the games, I had no problems with civ 5 in the downtime. Sure I could not run it on a new machine, but i didnt need to
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The government already stops people from protesting in real life. Your protests can't inconvenience anyone or you're in trouble.
Land of the free, home of the brave.
and yet, SONY's network status was blaring green ON into late night.
SCEA's PSN status page showed PSN being OFFLINE, no if's and's or but's. Perhaps SCEE forgot to update their page?
I'll be frank, I honestly don't buy that you've been playing any GOG games recently. Maybe it's because I can't be bothered with 'old classics'..
It wouldn't matter if the infrastructure of xbox live was open. It still depends on a central point of failure. This is an architecture and design issue. DRM can be implemented without the use of a central point of failure. Please stop spreading lies about how DRM is the cause of this.
I could architect a decentralized peer2peer design backed by central servers (that are not necessary to keep the service running for gaming purposes) while using certificate signing to verify signed code verses unsigned code among multi layer signature authentication schemes in hardware layers to detect tampering.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Of course not, I just don't think that you would spend your free time on Slashdot if you had that good of a game. You would play your game instead. I am not saying you don't go out to a Christmas party, go eat foods etc.
No, you're just trying to read too much into the motives of my post rather than applying common sense to my comment.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
My last of us won't start up unless I turn the network off, but it's definitely affecting some other things.
Little Big Planet 3, yes... since it is just a code in the box to redeem a digital copy of it...
LEGO Batman 3 they probably can play, I'll have them try it today, since it is on a disc...
It's caused by central architecture design that has a single point of failure. It doesn't matter if it was DRM or not. You could do similar things in the opensource world. Take out the DNS servers for ubuntu.com and now you can't access the default repositories that are all subdomains on ubuntu.com, you can't install software and by extension, use that software the normal way now through just opening your package manager.
Certificate signing through certificate authorities do not require the authority to even be online to operate. In fact, this is how signed code works with offline xbox systems. It's also how software is validated through Linux repositories identify they come from the genuine source.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
My experience has been that unless you are already in Offline mode (or put the computer in sleep vice shutdown), Steam and most of the games (some older games and indies will still run directly from executable) will not work unless you have a network connection and can connect to Steam. I travel a lot for work and am often without network connection, so this has been a huge deal for me, especially when offline mode decides it needs to authenticate and prevents me from accessing my games for the remainder of my trip (work around, sleep mode). The button "Start steam in off-line mode" that pops up when there is no network connection/steam unreachable has NEVER worked for me.
Unless they've changed how the system works with a recent (past couple months) client update, I'm sure these issues persist. Maybe it works for you, great if it does, but I wouldn't doubt _xeno_'s post either as their experience has been similar to mine.
You got that right with the "host your own thing". It is like the how Netflix is the worlds' problem when all of the worlds' movies come from one place. Unlike starvation. the internet can/will fix itself.
He is crazy if you think about it; I am not.
That's good to hear and a credit to Sony. Maybe MS should learn from the other examples.
That is likely.