Xbox LIVE, PSN hold strong, despite holiday threats

Christmas has come and gone, and much to the delight of gamers everywhere, both Xbox LIVE and PlayStation Network made it through without any major issues. Save for a few minor hiccups, both gaming networks held strong, despite presumably a large holiday influx of newcomers.

Of course, the major concern stemmed from threats from multiple "hacker" groups. Prior to Christmas, a group by the name Phantom Squad threatened to take down both gaming networks on Christmas. Later on, Lizard Squad — the notorious group which managed to bring down PSN and Xbox LIVE last Christmas — also joined in on the threats. Thankfully, it appears most of these warnings were just empty threats as neither network suffered a major outage this holiday season.

It's possible Microsoft and Sony were both better prepared for possible DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, although it seems more likely that these were just empty threats to begin with. The major social channels for each respective group have been fairly quiet since the initial threats.

Either way, both companies should be applauded, as both major gaming networks remained stable for much of the holidays — a drastic improvement over last year.