PSN Down After A DDos Attack That Hit Sony, Blizzard, Riot Games and More

Written by Brandon Hofer on August 24, 2014

News: A hacking group has taken responsibility for taking down PSN, Battle.net servers, League of Legends servers and more.

PlayStation Network is having a lot of problems this morning after being the victim of a “DDoS attack.” According to Shacknews, Sony isn’t the only one that has been under attack as Grinding Gear Games Path of Exile, Blizzard’s Battle.net servers and Riot’s League of Legends have also been targeted as well. It appears that, as of the time of this writing, that most of the problems with those attacks have already been addressed and fixed except for PSN. It is still down and you can’t do anything with it. This might have to do with the fact that it appears Sony might have been the main target here.

According to Forbes, a hacker collective known as “Lizard Squad” has taken responsibility for these DDoS attacks and issued the following statement on their Twitter,

“Sony, yet another large company, but they aren’t spending the waves of cash they obtain on their customers’ PSN service. End the greed.”

After checking on Sony’s Twitter it appears they have “auto reply” turned on to address a bunch of complaints they have been receiving since PSN went down. Their standard response has been, “We are aware of the issues and our engineers are working to restore service.”

Of course they really can’t say anything else right now as they are most likely still investigating the matter and they are trying to get PSN back online as quick as possible. This will, of course, bring up memories of the big PSN hack of 2011 but at this point there has been no indication that any consumer information has been stolen. At the moment this appears to just be a “simple” DDoS attack.

Going by their statement above, the party responsible for this attack seem to believe that Sony is “greedy” and bringing down PSN will somehow make their point. PSN was scheduled to go down tomorrow for scheduled maintenance but this is definitely not part of that. Their web store (store.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com) has also been affected and would not load as of the time this story was being written.

No timetable has been established for PSN going back online but hopefully this is a very temporary thing that will only last a couple of hours. Sony also has a big PSN Flash sale going on this weekend with some great deals that gamers won’t be able to access during this downtime along with another big sale coming up during PAX Prime in a few days.

Has this downtime affected you at all? Leave your comments below and we’ll be sure to report on any new developments as they take place.