14 DAY TRIAL // Last week saw the winter holidays finally roll around all over the world and this meant not just great time spent with the family or loved ones, but also presents, and for many gamers, quite a lot of new titles or consoles purchased for them.
Unfortunately, when it comes to consoles, many holiday periods are met with lots of waiting and even offline periods for their online services, as many users want to take their new devices online to download the inevitable firmware or system software updates, not to mention the various online games they got bundled with their new gear.
DDoS attacks joined the holiday rush
This year, however, in addition to the influx of new users, both the PlayStation Network and the Xbox Live marketplaces had to deal with a new threat, in the form of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks perpetrated by nefarious individuals like hacker group Lizard Squad.
All these factors led to prolonged outages and offline periods, during which owners of the new consoles were unable to use them, more or less, or were just restricted to playing offline games. Others who had their digital titles already downloaded found out, on the PS4 at least, that they didn't make the console their primary device, and were thereby unable to play the titles on their hard drives.
Sony and Microsoft shouldn't be excused
To some degree, these situations are hard to avoid, but both Sony and Microsoft have absolutely no excuse when it comes to getting caught by surprise by such events.
It can't be that hard to get extra servers and take extra precautions during periods when lots of users are expected to use their devices. The winter holidays, Easter, or Thanksgiving should at least require a few extra servers and measures from Sony and Microsoft, to ensure that the first experience of new users of their products isn't a negative one.
What's more, it seems that DDoS attacks are still the bane of their existence, as once again both the PSN and Xbox Live fell to these tactics. While Sony's network has proven its unreliability many times before, Microsoft's service has proven to be a tougher nut to crack in the past.
Now, however, both fell rather easily to the attacks, and eventually noted Internet mogul Kim Dotcom had to effectively bribe the hackers to stop their actions and allow Microsoft and Sony time to fix things.
Users need compensation
Both services are operational as of right now, but it still took a few days for things to return to normal. During this time, new PS4, PS3, PS Vita, Xbox 360, or Xbox One owners have been left with a bitter taste in their mouths, while existing users were unable to partake in multiplayer activities or use entertainment applications because of the outages.
Microsoft and Sony need to step up their game in the future, and right now, they need to come up with at least a few rewards for users whose patience they tested through the shoddy online services. Those who paid for PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live Gold should particularly get something back, even if it's just extra days added to their subscriptions, as they were unable to use them.
