PlayStation Network is being hit with DDoS attacks

Sony may be experiencing a few unpleasant flashbacks this weekend. Both the PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment are slowly recovering from a denial of service attack that flooded their server connections, kicking many gamers offline. The group claiming responsibility, Lizard Squad, reportedly started out bombarding servers run by Blizzard, Grinding Gear Games, and Riot Games before swinging its attention Sony’s way.

At the time of this writing, the PlayStation Network is offline, reportedly due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that occurred in the early hours of Sunday, August 24. Shacknews reports that other services and online games, such as Path of Exile,World of Warcraft and League of Legends were also attacked, but those seem to have recovered. It’s worth noting that this attack, if true, is not comparable to the 2011 PSN outage. Whereas the incident three years ago was due to compromised systems and an intrusion into Sony servers, a DDoS attack is much simpler, and basically floods the targeted network with data so that it can’t make new connections to legitimate users. Should the issue escalate or resolve, we’ll keep you posted.