PlayStation Network Down, Commercial Aircraft Diverted Amid Hacker Attacks on Sony

A day of Dedicated Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks has brought down Sony's PlayStation Network, limiting gamers' access to services like Netflix and the Sony store, Deadline reports.

A group claiming credit for the attacks on Twitter also implied that there were explosives on board the plane of Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley, who was traveling today from Dallas to San Francisco.

Upon hearing the news, American Airlines diverted the plane to Phoenix, where it was emptied and searched. No explosives were found.

A group calling itself Lizard Squad tweeted that it had gone after Sony's systems in retaliation for U.S. bombings of Islamic extremists in Iraq that go by the acronyms ISIS and ISIL. Terrorists claiming connection to that group released an American journalist earlier this weekend, after having circulated a graphic video of the execution of another who had been a hostage in Syria since 2012.

Sony representatives assured users that their data remains secure, that the DDOS attacks were happening "upstream" and clogging traffic routes to and from Sony. They pledged to work to get services up and running as soon as possible.

The last time PSN had a high-profile outage, it was when a major security hole was revealed in 2011. It took them almost a week to reveal that user data had been compromised, and a month to get back online. That attack led them to completely redesign their PS3 and PSP firmware.

PlayStation Network will launch a new series based on Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming's fan-favorite creator-owned series Powers in early 2015, making the service a must-have for many comic book fans.