2016 never intended to end without continuing to prove it was the biggest, baddest, nastiest year of them all, right up to the last few seconds.
So, it was pretty much par for the course when New Year’s Eve saw various gamers reporting outages across the PSN and Xbox Live networks.
While gamers from North America, Europe and Australasia all took to social media to vent their frustrations at the unexpected downtime, neither Sony nor Microsoft actually reported any problems with their respective networks.
In fact, Sony’s network status page reported no issues with the PSN, while Microsoft claimed that all services were still very much online.
While it’s unclear exactly what was going on (if indeed anything even was), the hacker group Lizard Squad quickly came forward to claim responsibility for the reported outages.
https://twitter.com/LizardInvasion/status/815353041952055296
While some users suggested they couldn’t see any evidence of outages or server downtime, others experienced problems getting online with games such as Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Destiny.
Certainly, it seems like whatever the problems were, only a small minority experienced them. Then again, that could be because most people were out abusing their livers on New Year’s Eve.
Lizard SquadLizard Squad has previously threatened to attack console gaming networks over the festive period, however – I guess everyone needs a hobby.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.