In a twist that makes today’s events on par with that of a modern action thriller, Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley’s flight from Dallas to San Diego has been re-routed to Phoenix Airport due a bomb scare allegedly called in by the same group who’ve claimed responsibility for today’s PlayStation Network outage.
Confirmed to The Arizona Republic by an American Airlines spokesperson, Flight 362 had to be diverted due to ‘security reasons’ following a threat which first cropped at 1:30pm Eastern on the Twitter account of ‘Lizard Squad’, the hacking group, who sent a message directly to American Airlines’ page about an apparent bomb on-board the flight carrying some 179 passengers and six crew.
.@AmericanAir We have been receiving reports that @j_smedley‘s plane #362 from DFW to SAN has explosives on-board, please look into this.
— Lizard Squad (@LizardSquad) August 24, 2014
Once the flight was grounded, Smedley resumed his previous Tweeting at 3:00pm Eastern by saying, ‘’something about security and our cargo. Sitting on Tarmac.’’
Something about security and our cargo. Sitting on Tarmac
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 24, 2014
Earlier on today, it had emerged that Sony’s PlayStation Network was under a DDoS attack – a technique employed to disrupt log-in servers by flooding the system with artificial traffic.
Sony has continued to update on the outage on its PlayStation Blog, but the company or indeed American Airlines are yet to fully comment on this particular turn of events.
UPDATE: It seems as though Flight 362 has been given the all-clear to continue on its route, as alluded to by Smedley’s latest Tweet.
All is well
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 24, 2014
Yes. My plane was diverted. Not going to discuss more than that. Justice will find these guys.
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 24, 2014
As ever, stay tuned to PSU for minute-by-minute updates regarding the breaking news.