Online hackers have taken credit for an online service outage of Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox game consoles Thursday that occurred as people unwrapped their new toys Christmas morning.

   PlayStation and Xbox acknowledged the outages of their networks on Twitter and said they were working to restore service.

   A Twitter user going by the name "Lizard Squad" took credit for the outage, claiming they had the "nation on strings."

   The account did not return request for comment and only became active Wednesday.

   The Lizard Squad name corresponds to a group of hackers that has caused havoc in the online world before.

   The group took credit for attacks that took down the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live network at the beginning of the month.

   Users vented their frustration with the outage online, and Xbox said on Twitter it could not estimate when service would return. (AFP)