**Anyone got any actual facts on this.** Reports have been flowing in on Twitter today that Xbox Live and PlayStation Network — the online services connecting Microsoft's and Sony's game consoles — are experiencing outages. Occasional downtime is par for the course for both, but Christmas Day is a particularly bad time, just as hundreds of thousands of PlayStation 4s and Xbox Ones are unwrapped and set up. As Polygon reported, a hacker group identifying itself as Lizard Squad had previously promised to take down the services today. The group is taking credit for the outages, but neither Microsoft nor Sony have confirmed the nature of their problems. It's possible that the networks are just straining under the load of the new consoles gifted over the last several hours. Microsoft's Xbox.com isn't currently loading at all; Sony's PSN status page indicates that the service is online, but an earlier tweet indicated that some users were having problems and that engineers were investigating. DDoS: Distributed Denial-of-Service Quote from a user in the forum: "Basically, a hacker puts a virus out in the wild, like those FREE IPAD! or LOOK AT BOOBIES FREE! sites and people who go there with no or outdated firewalls / anti-virus get infected. The virus gives control of the infected computers to the hackers. When the hacker takes control they act in unison and become a "botnet" . The hacker then has all the computers he controls via the virus send a simple "ping" request over and over again in rapid succession to the XBox servers. These ping requests clog up all the available bandwidth keeping everyone out. An easy analogy is telephones. Say you have a phone with call waiting, well, the hacker would have 1000 or so phones call you constantly on rapid fire speed dial so anyone really trying to call you would get a busy signal. It's important to know the computer ignorant enable this. You'd have to be a BILLIONAIRE to buy enough computers of your own out there. Hackers can only do DDoS because there's enough gullible morons going to obvious malware websites with no protection allowing their computer to be infected and used by hackers for the botnet needed."