British police said on Friday they had arrested a man in northwest England following the 2014 cyber attacks on Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox systems.

Both systems suffered long outages over Christmas after a major distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. A hacking group calling itself Lizard Squad, which had attacked the two networks earlier last year, claimed responsibility.

"Officers ... have arrested a man in Southport, Merseyside this morning as part of an investigation into 'swatting' and computer hacking offences," Merseyside police said in a statement.

The officers had worked closely with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the operation, it added.

No further details of the arrest were immediately available.

Swatting is a term used to describe criminal activity by an individual or group who provide false information to law enforcement agencies in the United States, suggesting that a threat exists at a particular location so that police respond with tactical units.