Why PlayStation Network Is Still Down, Even Though The 'Lizard Squad' Attacks Have Stopped

Flickr/Paul Albertella

Sony's PlayStation Network is still experiencing intermittent outages, as of Sunday morning.

On Saturday, the company acknowledged its network was hit with "high levels of traffic designed to disrupt connectivity and online gameplay" - also known as DDoS attacks, where servers are overloaded by massive amounts of bogus requests coming at the same time - for over 48 hours, through Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

The notorious hacker gang "Lizard Squad" claims responsibility for those attacks, but the group claims to have stopped its attacks two days ago.

So why is PlayStation Network still struggling to get back up, days after the attacks apparently ended?

In a Saturday "DramaAlert" interview with members Lizard Squad and other hacker groups, three Lizard Squad members discussed the events over the last few days and offered insight into the game networks.

Here's why PlayStation Network is still experiencing outages two days after the attacks have stopped, according to one Lizard Squad member:

I have an insider at Xbox telling me the attacks ceased shortly after Lizard Squad tweeted that they stopped them. Basically they're dealing with the aftermath: all the consoles trying to reconnect, trying to log in, trying to access content. It's a kind of scenario these game networks have never had to deal with before, and I don't think they have the capacity to have all these consoles making their requests at the same. Their own consoles are DDoSing their own network.

In other words, too many people are trying to access the network at once. And since many of these people are likely new console owners, and given the time of year, the network is facing heavy strain with all the new accounts getting added and all the old accounts attempting to troubleshoot their systems.

Another Lizard Squad member agrees that gamers are just seeing the "aftermath" of these attacks, not more attacks. 

After we made the deal with Kim Dotcom, basically, we stopped the attacks. Basically, what the result of them being offline was the aftermath - it wasn't a direct attack necessarily, just an aftermath of what happened on Christmas Day.

Dotcom, the German-born internet entrepreneur currently residing in New Zealand, offered lifetime premium memberships to the Lizard Squad in return for stopping the attacks on the game networks over Christmas.

A member of The Finest Squad, the hacker group that attempted to take down Lizard Squad over the holidays, also says he doubts the hacker gang is still attacking these networks.

"I know PlayStation's offline because they're trying to make it so it doesn't happen again," he says. "I know Xbox is online."