Xbox Live service fully restored, hackers take responsibility
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The last couple of days have not been fun for Xbox gamers as we’ve been reporting that Xbox Live service has been consistently plagued by various issues. But if you have been struggling these last few days to purchase content or even sign in to the service, you should now be able to fully enjoy your Xbox as the Xbox Live Status page is displaying a fully restored service as of now. However, according to a new report from Newsweek, a group of hackers known as “New World Hackers” is claiming the responsibility for the recent outages of the online gaming network. A member of the hacker group told our colleagues:
“Well, didn’t even take as long as I thought. We attacked Xbox to protest. Major companies like this have massive servers but no real protection. We want Xbox to update the protection they have, which isn’t much.”
It is about time XBOX dies.@XboxSupport @XBOX @KEEMSTAR
Enjoy the outage..
Half of U.S #OFFLINE
All of Europe #OFFLINE#NwHackers— New World Hackers (@NewWorldHacking) February 22, 2016
The hacker group, which has been previously targeting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and websites associated with ISIS, has also been credited for carrying out the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack ever against all BBC websites in December 2015. Some security experts like Zack Whittaker have been questioning their claims though, and Whittaker told Zdnet that the BBC DDoS attack was “nothing more than a publicity stunt from a faceless group.”
However, New World Hackers are also claiming responsibility for Xbox Live January outages that prompted American rapper Snoop Dogg to lash out at Bill Gates himself. The hackers also told Newsweek that “The Xbox attacks also prove we do have as much power as we say we do, going out to the doubters. We could honestly knock Xbox off the face of the Earth.”
We don’t know if we have to take these threats seriously, but we do know that it’s critical for Microsoft to provide a great Xbox Live experience to gamers as the company is now using its total number of Xbox Live active users to evaluate the health of its Xbox division in its quarterly earnings reports. As a company known for its best-in-class cloud products like Office 365 and Azure, Microsoft really can’t let consumers think that their gaming network is not as reliable as Valve’s Steam or Sony’s Playstation Network.
Anyway, Microsoft really had to get back Xbox Live online as soon as possible as the company is holding today an Xbox and Windows 10 media event in San Francisco, and we’ll probably have more details to share with you in the coming days. For now, we hope you’re as happy as we are to see Xbox Live back online! Please tell us in the comments if you think Microsoft will be able to protect its gaming network from hackers in the future.
