Xbox Live Went Down Yesterday, But It Wasn't Because Of Hackers

Julie BortJan 30, 2015, 01:23 IST

If you are an Xbox Live gamer, you probably noticed that the site was down yesterday.

The outage lasted for about three hours.

You may have taken to Twitter to complain about it, or research it, and saw people talking about how Xbox Live was hacked by the hacking group Anonymous.

That's because while Xbox Live was down, Anonymous tweeted that they had hacked the gamer network and stole a bunch of gamer data.

Anonymous also tweeted that they took Xbox down by blocking access to the site, through what's known as "distributed denial of service" attack (DDoS). A DDoS attack is when a hacker controls many computers all over the Internet and tells them to access a website at the same time, overwhelming the site with requests and bringing it down.

Microsoft isn't saying what caused the problem. We asked if it was a DDoS attack and were told "no comment." But a source close to the company tells us it wasn't anything as nefarious as a DDoS attack. Someone updated some software that Xbox Live didn't like, bringing the thing crashing down, our source suspects. That would make it an old fashioned human error, and would mean that your Xbox Live data is safe, not in the hands of hackers. With all the actual hack attacks going on, it might be nice to know that not every outage is really caused by a bad guy trying to steal your data.

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Xbox Live Went Down Yesterday, But It Wasn't Because Of Hackers