Gamer Calls 911 Over Christmas PSN Attack

Gamers were seriously frustrated by the PSN downtime over the holidays. One teenager went so far as to call 911 over the outage.

"Do you know about the whole thing that's going on with the PlayStation Network?" the caller asked the Palm Beach County Sheriff's 911 dispatcher (via WPTV).

The dispatcher put the caller on hold, and then asked colleagues about it.

"Yeah, I guess some people have been reporting it," she finally said to the caller. She then advised him to call Sony directly through their customer service number.

The Palm Beach County Sheriff's office tweeted a picture with a rough transcript of the exchange. They also added their own opinion at the end: "Last time I checked that wasn't an emergency. Try going outside or reading a book."

This whole thing makes me happy in a couple ways. First, young people still know to call the authorities when they have a problem. Yes, the Palm Beach County Sheriff is the wrong person to file this PlayStation Network complaint with but erring on the side of caution when reporting criminal deeds is a good habit to have.

Second, a sheriff's office has a dedicated social media presence and whoever mans it is sassy as hell. Yes, they took a swipe at my hobby of choice but I still chuckled. It's rare to see that kind of surliness during the holiday times, much less from a government official.

PSN was taken offline along with Xbox Live by a distributed denial-of-service attack launched on Christmas Eve. The parties responsible claimed they were trying to raise awareness of the shoddy security for those services. The attack persisted until December 26th. However, PSN took several days to fully recover.

While Florida sheriffs aren't tracking down the people who launched the DDoS attack, the federal government is. The FBI confirmed this week that they're currently investigating the group.