While Sony and Microsoft battled unsuccessfully to resume service to their respective online gaming platforms this past Christmas Eve and Christmas, Kim Dotcom has single-handedly stopped the outage.
How could one person so easily stop the outages that have plagued millions of gamers for the past couple of weeks? Just to give some background, Kim Dotcom is the founder of the now defunct file hosting service, Megaupload. While he is still awaiting trial for conspiracy to commit racketeering and criminal copyright infringement, he launched a new service called Mega. Mega is a cloud storage service that uses encryption to prevent intrusions from third parties.
Leveraging Mega, Kim Dotcom offered Lizard Squad an ultimatum: they would receive Pro1 annual Mega vouchers with 500GB of storage, but they had to leave Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network alone. As long as they committed to this agreement, the gifted Mega accounts would be converted to lifetime accounts. But, if they did not abide by this agreement, the accounts would be terminated.
Currently, service for both, Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network are returning to normal. Lizard Squad has acknowledged that Kim Dotcom is the reason they halted their attack.
Source: Twitter