Players of popular game consoles PlayStation and Xbox Live complained of network disruption on Christmas Day. Servers were down and account holders can't sign in, all because of a group of hackers who proclaimed themselves as the next generation Grinch, the Lizard Squad (LS).

Earlier this month, the Lizard Squad, a group of notorious cyber-terrorrists, threatened that they will put down Sony's PlayStation (PSN) and Microsoft's Xbox Live on Christmas Day, and so they did. The hackers claimed responsibility for the distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attacks through their Twitter account. DDoS is bombarding the server with requests causing it to overload and eventually stop functioning.

On December 23, LS posted a taunting tweet, saying, "The lulz will begin tomorrow if everything goes as planned."

"We, the Lizards, declare e-jihad on the Great Satan, the USA. Our enemies shall tremble as we take everything they've come to hold dear," another tweet said.

The attack started on Christmas Eve, Wednesday, and continued until dawn of Boxing Day, and perhaps will take the whole Friday to get the servers completely up-and-running again. The two gaming giants acknowledged the complaints on Twitter.

Throughout the downtime, LS has been posting scathing tweets nonstop, taunting Sony, Microsoft, and the gamers themselves. 

It also used gamers' desperation to gather followers for their alternate accounts. It tweeted, "Follow my backup @ImaPRoHackerr maybe psn will come back RT," but was later deleted. They also said that this might be their biggest attack yet.

Who should be thanked? 

Another group of hackers, who call themselves the Finest Squad (FS), claimed that they will set things right and protect the gamers no matter what, and promised to do everything to prevent these attacks. It also engaged in a twitter fight with the LS, cursing and calling each other names.

"Whether you support us or not, we will NEVER leave the scene no matter who tries to ruin the fun for gamers. #FinestSquad," it tweeted.

The Finest Squad tweeted updates on the fix they're doing, but apparently, they do not have the support of Sony and Microsoft. It kept on tweeting everyone to call Xbox Live and PSN to tell them the solution to the problem. They said to upgrade the companies' firewall and put a filter on traffic to their servers, and to rotate the domain name system (DNS) servers everytime a server reaches a certain amount of traffic.

However, it is uncertain whether the Finest Squad really did fix the problem, as the Lizard Squad gave the credit to a twitter user named Kimdotcom. Kim, owner of kim.com, a website dedicated to fight government spying, and founder of privacy company Mega, offered the Lizard Squad premium vouchers.

"Hi @LizardMafia, I want to play #Destiny on XBOX Live. I'll give your entire crew Mega lifetime premium voucers if you let us play. Cool?" he said. Turns out, the hacker group has 3,000 members, to which Kim still pushed through with his offer, saying "whatever it takes to let everyone enjoy their games during the holidays."

The Lizard Squad said that they stopped the attack momentarily while waiting for Kim's response. After the transaction was done, the Lizard Squad finally laid down its sword.

However, even though the LS stopped the attack, the servers were kept down for a couple more hours, with the LS assuring that they stopped two hours ago, and the current downtime is just the aftermath. The Finest Squad also tweeted that PSN and Xbox are down for maintenance and recovery.

As of posting time, most players can now access their games, although some can't still sign in. Xbox Live is still having trouble with IGN, Maxim, and MLG.TV applications. On the other hand, PSN is still resolving the problem, tweeting that theire technicians are working to fix the issue.