Xbox Live and PSN still recovering from the holiday, potential attacks (update)

After a day of sustained network outages across both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network, this morning members are still having difficulty connecting to their online service of choice.

According to their status page, the PlayStation Network is still down. A note dated Dec. 25 says that Sony is aware of the issue and will update as necessary. Information seems to be trickling out through the PlayStation Twitter feeds as well.

Meanwhile, Xbox Live has come back online. The service's status page says that core functionality, purchase and content usage, as well as music, video and gaming systems are all operational.

While it's not perfectly clear what is causing the outages, one major factor is many thousands of new consoles connecting to the network at the same time. Another is a concerted effort by several groups of self-proclaimed hackers who are performing brute force denial-of-service attacks against both Sony and Microsoft servers.

You can read more about the hacker war playing out right now in Polygon's report, or turn down the lights and watch the packets fly with this real-time map.

Update: As of this afternoon PSN is still not functional, and Xbox Live is experiencing limitations with issues primarily preventing users from performing downloads.