Xbox Live back up as hackers take credit for blocking it

If you've tried to log in to Xbox Live in the last day or so, you might have had some trouble getting on to the network.

A hacker group called Lizard Squad claimed to be behind blocking the service and that this is just "a small dose" of what's to come over Christmas.

Microsoft says Xbox Live is now up and running again.

Although support pages weren't updated while the service was down, users reported issues.

The network came under a DDOS, or a distributed denial of service attack, which overloaded the system, stopping genuine users from getting online.

One gamer told Newsbeat he had been getting an error code he had "never seen before" when trying to log on.

Xbox Live is the latest in a string of hacks Lizard Squad claims to be behind - it's taken credit for taking a number of high-profile targets offline, including EA games, Destiny and Sony's PlayStation Network.

Known as Lizard Patrol on Twitter, the anonymous collective has a Russian-based website.

Try to get on the homepage though and you'll get a warning which reads: "The site you were trying to visit may be unsafe."

As reports of Xbox Live going down started to appear, the group simply tweeted: "XBox Live #offline"

A series of posts included threats that this isn't the last hack planned for XBox Live: "Microsoft will receive a wonderful Christmas present from us"

Although Xbox support has started to respond to complaints from users on Twitter, Newsbeat requested a statement from Microsoft, but received no reply.

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