Steam, PlayStation Network Down: Gamers Report Problems With Online Gaming Services After Hackers Promised Christmas Cyberattack

UPDATE: 5:15 p.m. EST — The hacker group Phantom Squad tweeted Friday afternoon that Steam servers would be back online in the near future after users experienced issues with the gaming service Christmas Day.

However, Forbes reported Friday the gaming platform was logging users into other users' accounts and exposing some of their gaming information.

Original Story:

Gamers hoping to test out new games and consoles were experiencing outages with several major gaming services Christmas Day after hackers threatened cyberattacks on the holiday. Users reported problems Christmas morning with some features of the PlayStation Network, and others complained they could not access the Steam gaming platform or its store.

Last year, thousands of users could not use their new games when the hacking group “Lizard Squad” took down both the PlayStation and Xbox networks over Christmas. This year, a different group called Phantom Squad claimed it could take down Xbox Live and PlayStation Network over Christmas, but then the group said it was backing down and would let consumers enjoy their holiday.

However, a separate group, SkidNP, promised to attack the Steam and Minecraft servers over Christmas, TechWorm reported last week. Early Christmas morning, users began reporting a worldwide outage when trying to use Steam, and although SkidNP’s role was not immediately clear, a member of the group told TechWorm before Christmas the group wanted to use the holiday to expose flaws in the gaming systems. “We attack services to make them know what attacks are like so they can fix them,” the member told TechWorm.

Users took to Twitter Friday to express their frustration and attempt to figure out exactly which services were offline:

Steam did not respond immediately to user complaints Friday, but on the PlayStation front, the company wrote on Twitter users began reporting problems Christmas Eve.

PlayStation’s status website showed all of its features functioning Friday morning as users continued to complain of outages, but DownDetector.com showed more than 1,000 reports of PlayStation problems over the last 24 hours.

It was not known what was causing the problems with PlayStation Friday.

Some gamers also said they were experiencing issues with Xbox Friday, but others on Twitter seemed to be using the game system. Many said they were expecting outages and called on the gaming companies to protect themselves against the threatened attacks.

The hacker group PhantomSquad also said Friday it may still take down some gaming servers later in the day.