Play Station Network Brought Down By DDoS Attack

 Gamers woke up to an unpleasant surprise on Sunday morning when hackers brought down Sony's PlayStation Network by way of a distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attack.
Sony tweeted that the problem was being addressed:

Network update: our engineers are aware of the issues and are working to resolve them. We'll keep you posted - sorry for the inconvenience
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) August 24, 2014

The company also confirmed the outage in a blog post, saying that there had been "an attempt to overwhelm our network with artificially high traffic." On the bright side, Sony stated that "no personal information" had been accessed by the attack.
Per Shacknews.com, Sony Online Entertainment's servers and Blizzard's Battle.net servers were also hit.
A group called Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the attack. As Inquisitr points out, the group then indicated that the action against Sony's servers wouldn't stop until the U.S. ceased attacks on the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL):

Kuffar don't get to play videogames until bombing of the ISIL stops. #ISIL #PSN #ISIS
— Lizard Squad (@LizardSquad) August 24, 2014

Today we planted the ISIS flag on @Sony's servers #ISIS #jihad pic.twitter.com/zvqXb2f5XI
— Lizard Squad (@LizardSquad) August 24, 2014

Inquisitr also reports that Twitter user @FamedGod took credit for the attack after Lizard Squad initially claimed responsibility:

Why must someone take credit of ones work? LizardSquad couldnt hurt a fly. Decrypting a memory dump and finding the server was all my work.
— Fame (@FamedGod) August 24, 2014

In an alarming twist, Lizard Squad tweeted that explosives were on a plane carrying John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment:

.@AmericanAir We have been receiving reports that @j_smedley's plane #362 from DFW to SAN has explosives on-board, please look into this.
— Lizard Squad (@LizardSquad) August 24, 2014

TechCrunch reports that the plane was diverted to Phoenix to have its cargo inspected, presumably due to concern over Lizard Squad's tweets.
As of the publication of this article, the PlayStation Network is still down.