PSN goes down ahead of Lizard Squad’s Christmas promise

Ahead of the Christmas rush, Sony's PlayStation Network servers appear to be having some problems. Numerous users from around the world have reported problems accessing PSN, with Sony confirming the issues on its own status page.

Sony notes that the "gaming and social" aspects of PlayStation 4 are having problems. More specifically, Sony acknowledges issues "launching games, applications or online features."

The company assures their engineers are working to resolve the issue, but there's no timetable for when we can expect stability.

This doesn't appear to be a major outage, as I am currently connected online; however, the timing of the downtime understandably has some gamers concerned this could be another repeat of 2014. Last year, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack took PlayStation's gaming service offline for numerous days. Xbox LIVE was also down for a period of time.

Gamers are understandably worried something similar could be happening again this year as multiple "hacker" groups have threatened both gaming networks. Earlier this year, Xbox LIVE was reportedly taken offline for some time by a new group known as Phantom Squad. This particular outage doesn't appear related to the threats, although Lizard Squad — the notorous group responsible for last year's DDoS assault — tweeted the following tonight.

Is the timing of the tweet simply coincidental? Is this a warning of some sorts. Or are they trying to claim responsibility for tonight's outage in attempt to worry gamers before Christmas?

As of this writing, Xbox LIVE doesn't appear to be experiencing any unusual, widespread outages.