I noticed after we came home from breakfast with family yesterday morning I was unable to sign into Xbox Live. We only had a few hours before we had to head out again for another family gathering so I didn’t think too much of it. I did notice throughout the evening I was unable to view my friends via the SmartGlass app on my phone. I had been looking to see which of my friends had upgraded from the 360 to the Xbox One this Christmas.
It was then I was first made aware of the mass outage affecting both Xbox Live and PSN. I saw a series of tweets mentioning the outages and found confirmation on both IGN and CNN. When I saw that the outages were thought to be a result of DDoS attacks I felt quite a bit of anger. Why would someone be so cruel on a holiday that means so much to so many people? I could imagine the thousands of gamers, the young especially, trying to boot up their new consoles only to be met with nothingness. From what I understand many were not able to play at all as the games or consoles themselves required updates and were not able to receive them.
I was away all day so the outage didn’t affect me, but the fact that it was disrupting the Christmas joy of thousands of others saddened me. Did the outage affect you? Is it still affecting you? Xbox Live seems to be working as advertised right now for most people (including myself), but PSN is still mostly down.
What happened (in a brief, barely informed nutshell)?
The nuisance group which calls themselves The Lizard Squad apparently took both networks down yesterday. They were demanding retweets in exchange for releasing their grip on the networks. In the end Kim Dotcom seemingly single-handedly ended the attacks by offering Lizard Squad members premium MEGA accounts.
A group called Finest Squad spent most of yesterday and today countering Lizard Squad’s efforts, and has been working to bring the “hackers” to justice. Their efforts are greatly appreciated, and will hopefully deter future “pranks”.
avideogamelife 
Hope the FBI does something to this group. Its asinine to ruin other peoples holidays because they don’t like these corporations that’s good for them but people like myself love video games and I bought a system for one reason and that’s to play games on my online account. End rant.
Had a similar experience to you where I tried to login and thought maybe it was just a little outage because everyone got an Xbox game for Christmas. Found out later about the “hackers”. It didn’t make any sense to me to ruin the holidays for the regular people if they have issues with the big wigs. Though they later said it had something to do with “Tor” nodes that distribute information? I dunno…I just wanted to race some cars on Forza!!
Definitely a bummer for anyone who received a new console for the holiday. I’ve had mine since last Christmas and was still unable to enjoy it, since both games I got this year required updates and DLC downloads.