Xbox Live is back up after hackers claim they torpedoed it as a test run for a holiday attack [update]

Xbox Live appears to be back up this morning following a brief outage last night for which a hacker group claimed responsibility.

The outage, which lasted more than an hour, impacted both Xbox 360 and Xbox One users of Xbox Live. Consoles were responding with the 80151909 error code, which warns that an Xbox Live profile has failed to download. Polygon was also able to replicate the issue when we tried.

Microsoft's Xbox support site never appeared to indicate any issues with Xbox Live services or apps. But this morning, users are reporting that the service appears to be back up.

The hacker group Lizard Squad took to Twitter last night to claim responsibility for taking Xbox Live offline. The group, which describes itself as "kings" of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, tweeted that it was preparing for a larger attack at Christmas on Xbox Live and that today was a "small dose of what's to come."

Earlier this year, the group claimed responsibility for a similar attack on Sony's PlayStation Network, as well as denial-of-service attacks on individual online games like Grand Theft Auto 5, League of Legends, Destiny and more.

We've reached out to Microsoft for more information on the status of Xbox Live.

Update: Microsoft responded to us this afternoon with the following statement:

"Xbox Live was experiencing log-in issues for some Xbox 360 and Xbox One customers. Service has since been restored-customers now have full access to Xbox Live. As always, please refer to our Xbox Support page for the latest status updates.

"We do not comment on the root cause of a specific issue."