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Hackers Claim They Brought Down PlayStation Network

If you’re having trouble connecting to the PlayStation Network right now you’re not alone. PlayStation’s official support Twitter account has confirmed that PSN is working intermittently, and that Sony is working to fix the issue as soon as possible.

However, Sony said that there is no time frame at the moment for when service will resume as usual. It also said that some users are still able to log in to PSN or the PlayStation Store. I wasn’t, and received the message that the service is currently undergoing maintenance. Note that this is not the maintenance time Sony scheduled for Monday, August 25, from 9:40 AM to 4:50 PM Pacific Time. PSN will be down during that period of time as well, during which Sony will deploy a series of back-end improvements to the network.

As first spotted by Shacknews, a group of hackers on Twitter has claimed responsibility for the disruption of service, saying they targeted PlayStation Network, Blizzard’s Battle.net, League of Legends, and Path of Exile with denial-of-service attacks. DDoS attacks, as they’re called, are usually carried out by bombarding a service or website with enough communications requests to make it unavailable to legitimate users.

GameSpot has reached out to Sony and will update this story with any new information we receive.

Emanuel Maiberg is a freelance writer. You can follow him on Twitter @emanuelmaiberg and Google+.

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