Lizard Squad returns to knock Xbox Live offline again

The infamous hacking/trolling group known as Lizard Squad has claimed it has once again attacked the Xbox Live network, knocking it offline for gamers across the globe.

Reports of the outage were first logged by users at around 5am GMT on Monday, 16 February with the Xbox Live Status dashboard still showing that there is limited access to the network over three hours later.

Lizard Squad, which rose to prominence at the end of 2014 for its attacks on the PlayStation Network as well as Microsoft's online gaming system, has claimed responsibility. Having had its previous account suspended by Twitter, the group has been using the @LizardPhoenix account since 31 January and on Monday morning tweeted:

The group also made reference to the fact that the last time it attacked the Xbox Live network it only stopped when paid off by Kim Dotcom with vouchers for his online cloud storage service Mega, telling him now "to take his vouchers and shove them up his fat ass."

Looking at reports of the Xbox outage on Down Detector, the majority of reports came from the US, though considering the timing of the attack this is unsurprising.

Lizard Squad said that the attack was carried out in cooperation with a number of hackers from another group called LNO (Like None Other)

Lizard Squad have used distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Xbox Live and PSN previously as a way to promote its own DDoS-for-hire service known as LizardStresser.

When asked for a comment, a Microsoft spokesperson told IBTimes UK: "On February 15, 2015, we experienced a brief service interruption to Xbox Live and quickly restored services to normal." The spokesperson declined to comment on the reason for the outage.

Finest Squad

According to the level of outage reports on Down Detector, the attack only known the Xbox Live servers offline for three hours, with servers in the US and Europe now almost back to normal levels.

One of the reasons for this rapid return could be the work of another group of hackers known as Finest Squad, who said it was working to get the servers back up and running shortly after they were reported offline.

Finest Squad is a group of Netherlands-based white hat hackers who have previous history with Lizard Squad, having released personally identifiable information online about the group following the December attacks on PSN and Xbox Live.

The latest tweet from the group claimed Xbox Live was back to 100% in Europe while in North America the service was still at just 73%.