Hacker group Phantom Squad have claimed responsibility for PSN outages last night. Targeting several servers in a co-ordinated DDoS attack, Phantom Squad caused three servers to fail, as well as attacking 2K Interactive’s NBA 2K17 and EA’s Battlefield 1. Servers for GTA V failed briefly, too.
For those not up to speed, a DDoS attack is a Distributed Denial of Service attack, where hackers attempt to overload a site’s services by bombarding it with traffic. UK and EU gamers were among the worst affected by this latest incident, with individuals experiencing login difficulties as well as hacked accounts.
https://twitter.com/PhantomNations/status/808496018698465280
Despite Ask PlayStation later telling gamers that PSN was back up and running, many individuals are still without access to their accounts after email addresses were changed by the hacker group. Additionally, people playing GTA V are also reporting that they’re experiencing issues on all platforms, despite the Rockstar support page also showing everything as working.
This isn’t the first time that hacker squads have targeted both PSN and Xbox Live during the holiday season. Last year, many gamers were left frustrated during Christmas as DDoS attacks prevented login and sign-up on the 25th of December. In 2015, as well, Lizard Squad, another hacker faction, caused chaos when they launched similar attacks on several gaming networks.
As far as we know, PSN is now operating properly, but users with compromised accounts are advised to contact Sony customer support immediately.