Lizard Squad

2014eventclassic

Published September 5, 2026

Lizard Squad is a black hat hacking crew that ran a string of high-profile DDoS attacks on gaming networks in 2014 and 2015, hitting League of Legends, Battle.net, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live12. Their August 2014 stunt of falsely claiming explosives on a Sony executive's American Airlines flight and their Christmas Day 2014 takedown of PSN and Xbox Live turned the group into one of the most notorious online crews of the mid-2010s35.

hacking memesgamingcybersecurity memesmid 2010s memestrolling memes

Overview

Lizard Squad worked mostly through distributed denial of service floods, in which a wave of junk traffic overwhelms a target's servers until legitimate players can't connect3. The group announced each hit on Twitter, usually from the @LizardSquad handle, then followed up with taunts, screenshots of downtime pages and photos of themselves posing in balaclavas1. Their targets were almost always big gaming platforms: Riot's League of Legends, Blizzard's Battle.net, Sony's PlayStation Network, Grinding Gear's Path of Exile and Microsoft's Xbox Live12.

What pushed them past the usual script kiddie crew was the theatre around the attacks. They wrapped DDoS bragging in political trolling, at various points claiming attacks were tied to the bombing of ISIL and demanding companies stop being greedy with server budgets2. They also mixed in real-world stunts, including a fake bomb threat against a commercial flight, that dragged them into criminal investigations well beyond the usual gaming press cycle35.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter (@LizardSquad) / gaming networks
Creator
Lizard Squad
Date
2014

Lizard Squad's public run began on August 18th, 2014, when the @LizardSquad Twitter account claimed to have knocked League of Legends offline, followed the same day by an outage claim against RuneScape6. The next day, August 19th, the account said it had breached Riot Games enough to force a security upgrade and then boasted about taking Blizzard's Battle.net offline6.

The group broke into mainstream news on August 24th, 2014, when a wave of DDoS traffic hit Sony's PlayStation Network. Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley confirmed the attack on Twitter, writing that the company was "under attack by a large scale ddos"2. Hours later, @LizardSquad tweeted at American Airlines claiming there were explosives on Smedley's Dallas to San Diego flight, and the plane was diverted to Phoenix for a security check before landing safely in San Diego35.

How It Spread

After the Smedley flight incident, coverage jumped from gaming blogs to general tech and mainstream news, with TechCrunch calling it a stunt that was "not your typical DDOS attack" and CNET running a wire piece on the diversion of American Airlines Flight 36253. Shacknews tracked live updates as Lizard Squad rolled the attack across Battle.net, a Dota 2 stream, Xbox Live and other services throughout the day1. The @LizardSquad account tied the campaign to a political message, tweeting that "Kuffar don't get to play videogames until bombing of the ISIL stops" alongside #ISIS26.

The group's biggest single moment was Christmas Day, December 25th, 2014, when they took down both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network for most of the day, ruining console gaming for millions of people who had just unwrapped new hardware6. That evening, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom publicly offered Lizard Squad 3,000 Mega lifetime premium accounts to stand down, then tweeted a screenshot showing the deal had gone through with the @LizardMafia account6. In an interview with The Daily Dot the next day, members using the aliases "Vinnie Omari" and "Ryan Cleary" claimed the Christmas DDoS peaked at 1.2 terabits per second6.

Legal fallout landed on July 8th, 2015, when 17-year-old Finnish member Julius "zeekill" Kivimaki got a two-year suspended sentence, with no jail time, for 50,700 counts of aggravated computer break-ins6. Smedley called him a "piece of garbage" on Twitter, and within two days the @LizardLands account posted "Time for some more fun" before a fresh DDoS knocked Daybreak Games offline6. In April 2016, after Blizzard forced the private vanilla World of Warcraft server Nostalrius to shut down, @LizardLands retweeted images purporting to show personal emails of Blizzard employees and Blizzard customer service confirmed it was "monitoring a DDOS attack" on some of its games6.

How to Use This Meme

"Lizard Squad" is used less as a meme template and more as shorthand in gaming communities. When a big online service goes down around a holiday or major launch, players still joke that "Lizard Squad is back" even when the outage is unrelated6. The group's balaclava photos and their taunting @LizardSquad tweets are the images most often reposted in retrospectives about the 2014 to 2015 gaming outage era1.

Frequently Asked Questions

Lizard Squad

2014eventclassic

Published September 5, 2026

Lizard Squad is a black hat hacking crew that ran a string of high-profile DDoS attacks on gaming networks in 2014 and 2015, hitting League of Legends, Battle.net, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live12. Their August 2014 stunt of falsely claiming explosives on a Sony executive's American Airlines flight and their Christmas Day 2014 takedown of PSN and Xbox Live turned the group into one of the most notorious online crews of the mid-2010s35.

hacking memes gaming cybersecurity memes mid 2010s memes trolling memes

Overview

Lizard Squad worked mostly through distributed denial of service floods, in which a wave of junk traffic overwhelms a target's servers until legitimate players can't connect3. The group announced each hit on Twitter, usually from the @LizardSquad handle, then followed up with taunts, screenshots of downtime pages and photos of themselves posing in balaclavas1. Their targets were almost always big gaming platforms: Riot's League of Legends, Blizzard's Battle.net, Sony's PlayStation Network, Grinding Gear's Path of Exile and Microsoft's Xbox Live12.

What pushed them past the usual script kiddie crew was the theatre around the attacks. They wrapped DDoS bragging in political trolling, at various points claiming attacks were tied to the bombing of ISIL and demanding companies stop being greedy with server budgets2. They also mixed in real-world stunts, including a fake bomb threat against a commercial flight, that dragged them into criminal investigations well beyond the usual gaming press cycle35.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter (@LizardSquad) / gaming networks
Creator
Lizard Squad
Date
2014

Lizard Squad's public run began on August 18th, 2014, when the @LizardSquad Twitter account claimed to have knocked League of Legends offline, followed the same day by an outage claim against RuneScape6. The next day, August 19th, the account said it had breached Riot Games enough to force a security upgrade and then boasted about taking Blizzard's Battle.net offline6.

The group broke into mainstream news on August 24th, 2014, when a wave of DDoS traffic hit Sony's PlayStation Network. Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley confirmed the attack on Twitter, writing that the company was "under attack by a large scale ddos"2. Hours later, @LizardSquad tweeted at American Airlines claiming there were explosives on Smedley's Dallas to San Diego flight, and the plane was diverted to Phoenix for a security check before landing safely in San Diego35.

How It Spread

After the Smedley flight incident, coverage jumped from gaming blogs to general tech and mainstream news, with TechCrunch calling it a stunt that was "not your typical DDOS attack" and CNET running a wire piece on the diversion of American Airlines Flight 36253. Shacknews tracked live updates as Lizard Squad rolled the attack across Battle.net, a Dota 2 stream, Xbox Live and other services throughout the day1. The @LizardSquad account tied the campaign to a political message, tweeting that "Kuffar don't get to play videogames until bombing of the ISIL stops" alongside #ISIS26.

The group's biggest single moment was Christmas Day, December 25th, 2014, when they took down both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network for most of the day, ruining console gaming for millions of people who had just unwrapped new hardware6. That evening, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom publicly offered Lizard Squad 3,000 Mega lifetime premium accounts to stand down, then tweeted a screenshot showing the deal had gone through with the @LizardMafia account6. In an interview with The Daily Dot the next day, members using the aliases "Vinnie Omari" and "Ryan Cleary" claimed the Christmas DDoS peaked at 1.2 terabits per second6.

Legal fallout landed on July 8th, 2015, when 17-year-old Finnish member Julius "zeekill" Kivimaki got a two-year suspended sentence, with no jail time, for 50,700 counts of aggravated computer break-ins6. Smedley called him a "piece of garbage" on Twitter, and within two days the @LizardLands account posted "Time for some more fun" before a fresh DDoS knocked Daybreak Games offline6. In April 2016, after Blizzard forced the private vanilla World of Warcraft server Nostalrius to shut down, @LizardLands retweeted images purporting to show personal emails of Blizzard employees and Blizzard customer service confirmed it was "monitoring a DDOS attack" on some of its games6.

How to Use This Meme

"Lizard Squad" is used less as a meme template and more as shorthand in gaming communities. When a big online service goes down around a holiday or major launch, players still joke that "Lizard Squad is back" even when the outage is unrelated6. The group's balaclava photos and their taunting @LizardSquad tweets are the images most often reposted in retrospectives about the 2014 to 2015 gaming outage era1.

Frequently Asked Questions