by Nick Dowell
Sony's Playstation Network is currently offline in North America after a group calling themselves "Lizard Squad" initiated a DDoS attack over the past several hours.
Upon trying to access the PlayStation Store or PSN, users receive a notification that the services are down for maintenance. Other services, such as Netflix, still seem to be working properly.
This outage comes a day before the outage Sony announced earlier this week, which was planned to start at noon Monday and end around 7:30 EST.
According to Shacknews, the group has also hit Blizzard's servers, as well as League of Legends and Path of Exile. As of press time, Blizzard's Battle.net is live.
A DDoS attack (otherwise known as distributed denial-of-service) is an attack that attempts to make Internet resources unavailable to their intended users by interrupting the services of the host. A common method of doing so is utilizing bots to oversaturate servers with external requests to the point where they can't handle legitimate traffic.
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Sources: Shacknews, Polygon
Image: Polygon
