If you got a brand new PlayStation 4 for Christmas I hope you weren’t planning on using it on the PlayStation Network today as it appears that PSN is down due to a distributed denial of service attack. It appears that users all across North America are having issues logging into PSN on their consoles leading some to believe that hackers are targeting the PlayStation Network login servers.

A group of “hackers” on twitter calling themselves “Lizard Squad” have taken responsibility for today’s outage. They took to social media to request that their twitter account receive more than 10,000 re-tweets before they would cease their attack.

We are able to verify that attempts to sign into PSN from western Canada are being met with a message of “The Service Is Undergoing Maintenance”. At the time of writing the PlayStation Store website was also unavailable.

As soon as PSN comes back online we’ll update this post.

Source: Kotaku

The latest tweet on the official PlayStation Twitter account is from six hours ago (as of press time) stating that engineers are working on the current outage:

We’re aware that some users are having issues logging into PSN – engineers are investigating

— PlayStation (@PlayStation) December 25, 2014

Update (11:30PM EST) – No updates from the PlayStation twitter account in regards to the PSN outage. The official PSN Status Page shows that the service is “Offline”. We will update when we know more.

Update #2 (12.28.14) – According to Sony’s official PSN status page service has resumed on all platforms. We tested with our in-office PS4 and everything appears to be back to normal!