PSN Down After DDoS Attack?

 Sony's PlayStation Network (PSN) is reportedly down for maintenance today after a DDoS attack. DDos stands for Distributed Denial of Service, whereby hackers make several computers on their network all contact a specific website or server repeatedly. The unexpected and sudden increase in traffic can make the website load very slowly for genuine users, or in extreme cases, can shut the site down completely for a while, which seems to have been the case here.

                                           

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 According to an article by ShackNews, the PlayStation Network and several other gaming servers have fallen victim to various DDoS attacks recently including: Blizzard's Battle.net servers, which run some very popular online games such as Hearthstone, Diablo 3, World of Warcraft. It appears that the attacks started with the Blizzard servers before swiftly targeting Riot's League of Legends, Grinding Gear Games' Path of Exile, and then moving onto Sony's PlayStation Network.

The attacks are reportedly the work of a group of hackers who are calling themselves Lizard Squad. The group have posted several Tweets over the last few days taking responsibility for the attacks. The situation is ongoing as all of the affected servers attempt to get their services running again.

There was  a routine maintenance already scheduled for Monday the 25th of August 2014, but now the server and its relevant services could be down for even longer than Sony had originally planned.