PSN And Xbox Live Crash Results In Gaming Weekend From Hell

Gamers Had The Bank Holiday Weekend From Hell
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Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and Battle.net were all hit with major disruption this weekend as hackers launched their single largest attack on the gaming community.

The attacks left the PlayStation Network down for much of Sunday while Xbox Live, and Battle.net suffered smaller but constant disruption for the entire weekend.

It's believed the attack was connected to a bomb threat made at an American Airlines flight which had a Sony executive on board.

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John Smedley, the president of Sony Online Entertainment tweeted that PSN was coming under attack before boarding the plan, the threat was then made shortly afterwards.

The plane was safely diverted and no bomb was found.

In order to bring down Sony's servers the hackers used a Distributed Denial of Service attack which involves bombarding the victim's servers with so much traffic that they overload and have to shut down.

It's not yet clear who is behind the attacks however one Twitter account claimed responsibility on behalf of ISIL saying, "Kuffar [non-believers] don't get to play videogames until bombing of the ISIL stops."

The BBC points out that this could be a diversionary tactic as the same account had previously tweeted: "Sony, yet another large company, but they aren't spending the waves of cash they obtain on their customers' PSN service. End the greed."

To make matters worse another account with ties to the online activism group Anonymous has also taken responsibility for the attack saying that it was to highlight Sony's need to up its security.