Xbox Live service fully restored, hackers take responsibility

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Published onFebruary 25, 2016

published onFebruary 25, 2016

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The last couple of days have not been fun for Xbox gamers as we’ve been reporting thatXbox 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 theXbox Live Status pageis displaying a fully restored service as of now. However, according to a new report fromNewsweek, 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@KEEMSTAREnjoy the outage..Half of U.S#OFFLINEAll 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 toldZdnetthat 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 promptedAmerican 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 nowusing its total number of Xbox Live active users to evaluate the health of its Xbox divisionin 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 todayan 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.

Radu Tyrsina

Radu Tyrsina has been a Windows fan ever since he got his first PC, a Pentium III (a monster at that time).

For most of the kids of his age, the Internet was an amazing way to play and communicate with others, but he was deeply impressed by the flow of information and how easily you can find anything on the web.

Prior to founding Windows Report, this particular curiosity about digital content enabled him to grow a number of sites that helped hundreds of millions reach faster the answer they’re looking for.

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Xbox Live service fully restored, hackers take responsibility