Xbox Live was down last night for tens of thousands of gamers. It was revealed pretty quickly that the outage was the result of a malicious attack.

Now, hacking group Lizard Squad has claimed ownership of the attack and hinted at a much larger plan for Christmas. They fired this tweet out after 9 o’clock p.m. last night.

So, perhaps marking your calendars is in order. If you’re currently an Xbox One or Xbox 360 owner, plan on keeping your gaming offline for Christmas. If you’re getting a new console for the holiday, perhaps you should try and pick up a title with a stellar single player campaign to keep you occupied while the Live service gets sorted out.

Microsoft has a few weeks to prepare, so maybe this DDOS attack won’t be felt too much. Who knows?

Whatever the case may be, Dec. 25 looks like it will be rather annoying for Microsoft and gamers looking to play online.

Gotta feel for the employees who will be forced to work on Christmas instead of spending time with their families in order to get the console’s services up and running. The temporary loss of online gaming is small potatoes compared to that side of this whole thing, at least in my opinion.