Xbox Live Taken Offline By Hackers

Lizard Squad didn't wait until Christmas to victimize Xbox Live again. They launched a DDoS attack on Friday night that took down the online service.

The outage only affects Xbox Live on Xbox 360. Xbox One's online service is working normally. As of this morning, Xbox 360 is still having issues. Users are unable to sign in or download certain apps.

"We want you to know we’re aware of the issue and currently hard at work to find a fix. Thanks for being patient during this process. We’ll update you when more information is available," says an update on the Xbox Live Status page published this morning.

This is the second time this week that Lizard Squad has attacked Xbox Live. They brought the service four days ago. On the group's surprisingly unsuspended Twitter account, they seem to hint that more mischief will be coming today or Sunday.

At the time of their last attack, Lizard Squad promised they would take down Xbox Live on Christmas. It seems they couldn't wait until then to cause more inconvenience for Xbox gamers.

Lizard Squad first made themselves known to gamers three months ago when they launched a DDoS attack on PSN, bringing down the service on all platforms. During that same weekend, they also brought PC games like World of Warcraft, League of Legends and PlanetSide 2 offline. While doing all that, they also found time to call in a bomb threat on Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley.

The huge inconvenience that the group manages to cause on a regular basis has been frustrating. What makes it even frustrating is not knowing what to do about it. Some have started a White House petition asking the administration to take further action. They'll get a response from the White House if there are enough signatures but are a few paragraphs of "we hear your concerns" aren't going to fix anything. Still, it might be the only concrete action consumers can take. Otherwise, they're left simply hoping that these game companies are able to find ways to mitigate these problems, or that the FBI finds the responsible parties.