Xbox Live and PlayStation Networks Downed By Apparent Attack 160
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.
Re:Bunch of knobs (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re:Bunch of knobs (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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.
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Do they need PSN to play those games?
I've played both Tomb Raider and GTA:V yesterday just fine without PSN connection.
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My last of us won't start up unless I turn the network off, but it's definitely affecting some other things.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
Re:Bunch of knobs (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that's a far better approach than needing to log onto the server before you can play.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Re:Bunch of knobs (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 s
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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.
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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.
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You're right, the proper term is "Poetic justice."
It was because of .. (Score:3)
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!!
Error U.S. can't be .. (Score:2)
.. 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)
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seriously? only for a few. opium for the masses in the US = NFL on Sundays, Budweiser beer and throwing pennies at homeless people. (UK is probably Premier League Soccer, Rugby Union, shin kicking, and trying to follow up on what Kate Middleton is wearing today).
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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
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If the problem is under-provisioning, the expecte
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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.
NK the moive is on google play as well (Score:1)
so you missed 1 of 3
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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.
Real Actual DDoS (Score:1)
Or "DDoS" caused by everyone trying to get their new Christmas toys on line at the same time, and Sony damage control claiming an attack?
Except Game Servers Aren't Down (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Except Game Servers Aren't Down (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to not understand what you own. These devices were not DESIGNED for playing games.
They were built to take money. And they do that job very well.
And if they can't take money there's no point in the system working at all.
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And if they can't take money there's no point in the system working at all.
And if people leave your system because they can not play then it is not good either. Nice rant against making money.
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Free only on Sony machines that aren't the PS4. PS4 requires* PS+ for multiplayer.
requires* = not-required for asynchronous multiplayer (a la a chess game with a send-turn feature), F2P titles, and MMO's.
For example, you can play DCUO or War Thunder online without PS+
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That's the problem. They don't really care if you play. The game is only a pretext for you to spend more money. If you have no way to spend money, the game does not matter to them.
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That's the problem. They don't really care if you play. The game is only a pretext for you to spend more money. If you have no way to spend money, the game does not matter to them.
And farmers don't really care if we eat. The food is just a pretext to get me to spend money. (I know the analogy can be destroyed fairly quickly but honestly what for-profit company doesn't make their product to get money?)
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Uh, no it's not.
When Steam client fails to connect to the server it will (after a long timeout) let you play your games in its offline mode. I've done it before.
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How long a timeout? Because Steam was down just the other day and the way it reacted was dumping me to the login screen, requiring me to re-enter my Steam password despite it being "saved", and then failing to connect because it was down, at which point it quits.
To get Steam into Offline mode, you must first connect to Steam.
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Very wrong.
I was changing between net connections a few months ago - three weeks with no internet, and due to hot weather I had my computer turned off when I wasn't actually sitting in front of it, so no persistent data from a login. Maybe a minute or two after startup in MS Windows a message about Steam being unable to connect would come up. I played Skyrim ten to twelve times offline during that time.
I had connection problems last week,
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I checked. Steam doesn't have a status page, so you have to rely on Reddit threads. Steam was definitely actually down since other people couldn't get online either. You most certainly cannot start Steam in this state, there's no way to do it, it will be unable to authenticate because it can't contact the servers, so it'll demand you reenter your password. At this point there's now no way to get into offline mode because Steam can't get past the login.
In my past experience with Steam, the only way to get in
Yet it works for me - and you if you try (Score:1)
Bullshit. You can start the games without any network connectevity at all which IMHO is what they should all fall back too apart from the obvious multiplayer ones where the actual program needs a network to function.
So now I'm getting curious - I know that you are wrong and I'm betting that you know as well, so what is the motivation for you pushing the bullshit? Is this some fanboy thing where you have decided you have to claim that team B suffers from
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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,
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Since you called me a liar with your "Apparently you're supposed to know ahead of time when your Internet connection will die for a week" what sort of value do you think I'm going to place on that guarantee? You appear to be scum that take politeness as weakness. I should have just called you out as a liar to start with instead of politely giving a real example to counter your deliberate misinformation.
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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 tha
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That is both deliberate misinformation and calling me a liar over my account of how it behaved above.
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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 o
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When Steam client fails to connect to the server it will (after a long timeout) let you play your games in its offline mode.
That's how it works on the PS3/PS4....but...there are games that are online only and don't have offline modes. Destiny, DCUO, FFXIV
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There's GOG.
Which doesn't have any such system.
Is usually cheaper than Steam.
Often have extra content over Steam.
Give away games not given away in other places.
Also have Linux client.
And so on.
But it doesn't give Steam keys and don't have as much client software. So if you want to brag about your Steam games or Steam achievements or take part of the Steam community whatever that really is it won't cut it.
But if you only want games and want to be able to play them without problems and cheaply it's likely bet
Effing Grinches That Spoiled Christmas (Score:2)
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.
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Less merry for adults, too. We got an Xbox One for the grandkids, and I tried to help my son get it sorted for a couple of hours. The situation was magnified by inappropriate error messages from Microsoft pointing fingers at our cables, our network, our ISP's network, and, in short, everything except their own darned servers! A single approximately correct error diagnosis from them (like "Our servers may be knackered. Check back later.") would have redirected our efforts more appropriately.
When I finall
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Keep board games handy. Everyone can play and interact like a real family and your kids won't end up as pedos on 8chan.
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Yeah, it's just nasty.
But games can be played offline too. But maybe not when it's new and one want to sign up and such?
Gift day is the 25th in the US?
As for board-games I thought about that when I was over at a friend who have an Xbox One and we were supposed to play some and it wouldn't connect for us either.
He don't play them but I do and I had just got Dungeon Lords Anniversary Edition from backing it on Kickstarter and there's little chance that "wouldn't run" if you had anyone to play with.
Then again
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Screw 'em. Take a day off gaming. If they can't find something else fun to do besides play on their XboxOne or PS4 for one single Christmas Day, then you've been a shitty parent. Next thing you know they're gonna start talking about ethics in game journalism and SJWs and then you have to drown them.
Better they learn now that not all gratification is instant, and an online first-person sho
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That sounds charming, but there was no clue during the setup of the new Xbox One that the problem was due to their network failure. The error messages presented to us as we were trying to figure out the setup were that our cables, local network and ISP DNS server were not working. There was no suggestion offered by the box that a server outage was a possibility. Yes, we did go on to other things, but it took us two hours to decide it was likely the problem was not in fact ours.
Your smug superiority is mis
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It won't kill you not to play your sociopath simulator for one day, cuck.
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I don't side with. I side against. Against 8chan pedos. Against rape apologists and definitely against anyone who harass women or condone sexual abuse of children. Against #GamerGate.
And definitely against anyone who would shit all over my long-time preferred pastime of video games the way GamerGate has done. More damage has been done to the gaming community in 2014 than in any time since I've been gaming. And sonny, I've got game cartridges that are older than you are. I've
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That's really how they talk.
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I tried to come up with "why?" too.
Is it simply because they want to extort Sony and Microsoft for money?
I assume it's not revenge for TPB raid or "PC master race! Console peasants!"
Not completely certain... (Score:1)
Alternate theory. (Score:3)
Policy Decision (Score:1)
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Another issue is why the mentioned "normality of so many people's lives" are so closely tied to services of two corporations.
Can't let them generation gap you (Score:1)
Not Xbone owners... (Score:2)
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.
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I haven't used the PS4 but this was a problem for the PS3 as well (in addition to the fact that their update server seemed to run at dial up speeds)
Lucky me (Score:2)
/ Seems if your save file is >10 meg you lose
Service back up due to Kim Dotcom (Score:2)
Curiously, Kim Dotcom saved the day: https://twitter.com/LizardMafi... [twitter.com] https://twitter.com/KimDotcom [twitter.com]
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Kind of makes you think he was behind the attacks to begin with, huh? Otherwise, why negotiate with terrorists?
Re: Some day you children will have a REAL problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?