PlayStation Network Down? Hacker Group Phantom Squad Claims Responsibility, Threatens To Extend Outage

UPDATE: 10:40 p.m. EST — PlayStation's status page showed all its services were up and running late Monday night after nearly a full day of being offline. Some users on Twitter began to report the gaming network was working again around 10:30 p.m. EST.

Despite their happiness over having access to their video games once again, many gamers also expressed anger at Sony for allowing the problems and at hacker group Phantom Squad, which claimed responsibility for the outages.

Original Story:

The hacker group Phantom Squad claimed credit for taking down the Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) on Monday evening, after users had been experiencing problems with the gaming platform for a large part of the day. The group’s official Twitter account posted messages saying it was “back for some action” and threatened to extend the outage until Thursday.

PSN users took to Twitter and community forums to report problems in Europe and the U.S. Initial reports of the problem seemed to indicate it affected the PS3, PS4 and PS Vita, as well as with purchasing digital games. The online version of the PlayStation Store also remained down Monday evening.

But as Phantom Squad made its involvement public, some Twitter users said the problem had extended to other PSN services such as PlayStation Music. One Twitter account associated with the hacker group Anonymous also claimed Monday evening that PSN was down in every country.

PlayStation’s main support account on Twitter was responding to user complaints all day and Sony asked gamers to stay patient as they worked to determine the cause of the outage.

After Phantom Squad claimed to plan an attack on the gaming network over the holidays, it decided to let users enjoy their PlayStation gifts in December. Phantom Squad claimed credit for taking down Xbox Live in December and Steam, another gaming platform, also experienced significant outages over Christmas. In 2014, a different hacking group called Lizard Squad took down PSN and Xbox Live with a distributed denial of service attack.

Sony has a history with PlayStation outages. In addition to the recent holiday time attacks, PSN’s security was compromised in 2011 and the network saw a 23-day outage, the Verge reported. So far, the company has been unable to tell users when it will be able to return service to normal and Phantom Squad’s latest Twitter updates suggest Sony may not be in control of the situation.