So my nephew Dylan unwrapped a PS4 yesterday morning, and by 10am he was sitting on my sister's living room floor practically vibrating with excitement, cable already plugged into the TV, controller charging. And then... nothing. Couldn't sign into PSN. Couldn't even get through the initial setup screen that wants you to log in before it lets you do much of anything. He kept restarting it like that was going to fix a problem that had nothing to do with his console.
Turns out it wasn't just him. Sony's PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live both went down hard on Christmas Day, and a group calling themselves Lizard Squad took credit for knocking them offline with a DDoS attack. Classic move, timing it for the one day of the year when the largest possible number of brand new consoles are getting unboxed under trees across the country. Kids waiting all year for one specific present, and the servers just weren't there.
I spent about forty minutes trying to help him troubleshoot before I gave up and just told him it wasn't his router, wasn't his HDMI cable, wasn't anything he did wrong. That's a hard thing to explain to an eleven year old who just wants to play the game that came in the box. He ended up messing around in the PS4's local menus and eventually got a couple minutes of a demo working, but the actual online stuff, PSN store, trophies syncing, any of it, was dead pretty much all day.
Here's the part that annoys me more than the outage itself: this is basically a stunt. Lizard Squad has been doing this kind of thing for a while now, taking down gaming networks and bragging about it on Twitter, and there isn't really a product or a cause behind it, just the attention. I get that DDoS attacks aren't hard to pull off if you've got the botnet for it, and I'm not going to pretend I understand the full mechanics, but the target selection here was the whole point. Christmas Day. Maximum number of new users trying to activate a console for the first time. Maximum frustration per attack.
It's also a pretty blunt reminder of how much these consoles depend on being online now, even for stuff that used to be entirely local. Dylan wasn't trying to play some multiplayer shooter online, he just wanted to get past the setup screen. A console that ships requiring an internet handshake before you can really use it is a console that's vulnerable to exactly this kind of outage, planned or not. I don't think that's a reason to go back to disc-only offline gaming or anything dramatic like that, but it's worth sitting with for a second when your nephew is staring at a spinning icon on Christmas morning.
This whole month has been rough for anyone paying attention to this stuff anyway, between the Sony Pictures hack and the mess around "The Interview" getting pulled from wide release and then popping up in a couple hundred independent theaters and online on Christmas Eve instead. I'm not going to rehash all of that here since I feel like every tech site on the internet has already written the same five paragraphs about it this week. But it's hard not to notice the pattern of the last few weeks: entertainment and gaming infrastructure getting hit right when the most regular, non-technical people are paying attention. My mom asked me yesterday if "the internet was broken," which, no, but also I get why that's what it looked like from her chair.
By dinnertime things had mostly recovered for Dylan, he got matched into a game with a friend around 6, and the crisis of his young life was over. Sony and Microsoft both put out statements saying they were aware and working on it, which is the kind of sentence that means almost nothing but is also the only sentence available in that situation. I don't have a system administrator's view into what actually happened on their end, just a kid's disappointed face for most of an afternoon and then relief once the servers came back.
Anyway. If you got a new console this week and it wouldn't connect, it wasn't you. Go eat some leftover pie and try again later.