Xbox players around the world took to Twitter and social media on Valentine’s Day to ask Microsoft why their Xbox Live service had gone down. The Xbox Support Twitter feed was a little less than helpful, saying, “Our teams are investigating Social and Gaming issues on Xbox One. Keep an eye here (XBL Status) for updates.” Meanwhile the hatred kept pouring in from all sides. Typical comments section stuff; you know how it is. “My boyfriend is mad and you’re ruining our Valentine’s day” kind of stuff; empty threats about switching to PS4.
It probably wasn’t funny for Microsoft, but apparently hacking group New World Hackers (NWH) was behind the attack, and they were in it for the lols. A representative for the group contacted the website Hackread to take responsibility for the outage, claiming that it was a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. “We attacked XBOX as once again a test of our power,” the representative said. Apparently the whole thing was just practice, and NWH is planning on taking down “…a few major ISIS channels next month.” Microsoft has not confirmed that the outage was due to a DDoS attack, so there’s always a chance that these guys are trying to take credit for something that they didn’t actually do. I suppose we’ll wait and see if they show up in the headlines next month for pissing off Daesh.