Xbox Live goes down, but service is gradually recovering; more attacks threatened

Hacker group LizardSquad claims responsibility and threatens Christmas attack — describing outage as ‘a small dose of what’s to come’

Hackers took down Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service early this morning, threatening an even bigger attack at Christmas.

Reports of outages surged early this morning, with the majority of outages around 2am to 3am, according to Down Detector. Reports briefly dropped off after that, before surging again over the morning. They have been gradually tailing off since around 4.30am.

Microsoft this morning reported that all services were up and running. Xbox Live is used to power online gaming and internet services on Xbox One and Xbox 360.

A group using the account ‘Lizard Squad’ took responsibility for the attack on Twitter this morning. The group calls itself 'ddos kings' — a reference to distributed denial of service, a kind of attack often used to take down websites and the likely strategy used to disrupt Xbox Live.

“Microsoft will receive a wonderful Christmas present from us,” the group tweeted. They also posted a link to a stream of users complaining about the outage, and a post saying that the service had been took down.

“Just some preparation for Christmas,” the group said. “That’s a small dose of what’s to come on Christmas.”

The group describes itself as “The ddos kings formerly known as LizardSquad” in their Twitter bio. “Some lizards just want to watch the world burn.”

The group said that it is taking requests for its future targets.