A Grinch struck PlayStation Network (PSN) on Christmas Day, and it has not recovered from its offline status since then. The culprit: Lizard Squad.

The group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but said that they have halted operations and are going dark momentarily.

"Attacks were stopped around 2 hours ago, the current downtime is just the aftermath," Lizard Squad tweeted.

The word "offline" still greets users up to this time when accessing the official PSN website, together with this message.

"We are aware that some users are experiencing difficulty logging into the PSN. We will update this article with any changes that occur in regards to this issue. Thank you for your patience."

Unlike the other hacking incidents that occurred this year, it seems that Sony is having quite a difficult time resurrecting PlayStation Network. Using its Twitter account, PlayStation assured users that they are exhausting all possible means to go online again.

"Our engineers are continuing to work hard to resolve the network issues users have experienced today. Thanks for your continued patience!" PlayStation tweeted a few hours ago.

Sony PlayStation has been a favorite target of cyber hackers. There have been a number of times this year that PSN has gone offline. The most recent was the attack that rendered downtime on PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network in early December.

The outage was brought about by DDoS or distributed denial of service. This kind of hacking activity jams internet traffic where flooding originates from various sources. For this reason, identifying the legitimate source can be a daunting task. Even blocking IP addresses cannot remedy a DDoS attack.

Xbox Live is in the same boat as PlayStation Network, as users reported various issues logging into their accounts and connectivity fluctuations.