Even after Washington pointed the finger at North Korea for the massive cyberattack on Sony Pictures, some experts say the evidence is far from clear cut.

President Barack Obama earlier this month took the unusual step of naming North Korea for the crippling attack, while promising that the United States would "respond proportionately" after the FBI said evidence pointed to Pyongyang.

Internet giant Google's unwillingness to obey Chinese law is to blame for the shutdown of its hugely popular email service, state-run media said Tuesday after the last easy way to access Gmail was apparently blocked.

"China welcomes the company to do business on the prerequisite that it obeys Chinese law; however Google values more its reluctance to be restricted by Chinese law, resulting in conflict," the Global Times said in an editorial.

China has blocked the last remaining way to access Google's popular e-mail service, experts said Monday, as authorities work to establish "Internet sovereignty" by controlling what enters the country via the web.

Gmail, the world's biggest e-mail service, has been largely inaccessible from within China since the run-up to the 25th anniversary in June of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

Twitter was back online Monday following a partial outage which the company said was due to a bug.

"Some users were unable to sign in to Twitter. This issue was due to a bug in our front end code, which has been patched," the California-based company posted from the U.S. West Coast late Sunday.

Microsoft's online network for its Xbox gaming console was restored to nearly full service Friday after an allegedly coordinated Christmas Day hack brought it and Sony's PlayStation network down.

The PlayStation network remained down, while Xbox's service returned to all except three of its applications during the day.

South Korean prosecutors raided the Seoul headquarters of LG Electronics on Friday following allegations that the firm's executives vandalized their rival Samsung's washing machines at a trade fair in Germany, company officials said.

Samsung Electronics had filed a lawsuit accusing the LG executives of defamation, property damage and obstruction of business and said LG home appliance division president Jo Seong-Jin was among those who damaged machines displayed at September's event in Berlin.

North Korea may be facing explosive hacking accusations, but analysts are questioning how an isolated, impoverished country with limited Internet access could wage cyber sabotage -- and many experts believe China plays a role.

The US has accused Pyongyang of hacking Sony Pictures, which was intimidated into initially cancelling the comedy film "The Interview" that mocks North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, before deciding to release it online and in selected US cinemas on Christmas Day.

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.

Google and Microsoft joined forces with Sony on Wednesday, using their online might to release "The Interview" film to online audiences despite threats from hackers.

"Of course it was tempting to hope that something else would happen to ensure this movie saw the light of day," Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in a blog post.

Facebook said Thursday it had teamed with the National Football League to show ad-sponsored video clips at the leading social network.

The move comes as Facebook tries to tackle a multi-billion-dollar television advertising realm seen as ripe for disruption by Internet technology.