This long holiday weekend hasn't been a good one for gamers. Both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network were taken offline over Christmas, just as hundreds of thousands unwrapped their new consoles and plugged them in for the first time. But now, nearly three days after both services went offline, gamers are now free to play online once again.

PlayStation Network engineers brought the service back online on Saturday, and Microsoft had Xbox Live back up and running on Friday. Sony has confirmed in a blog post that its network was victim to a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), which overwhelmed its servers with "artificial," or junk traffic. It's believed Xbox Live was subjected to the same attack.

The hacker group Lizard Squad has taken credit for the outages, but the group said on Twitter that it had ceased attacks late on Christmas Day after receiving a several hundred dollars' worth of gift cards from Kim Dotcom. It's not clear what kept Sony's service offline for so much longer after the attacks were reportedly ceased.