After one of the year's biggest weeks for releases (expect to see MK and Portal 2 reviews up shortly) Sony is suffering from "external intrusions" and on the evening of April 20th they shut down both PSN, and also Qriocity, a music platform that was recently introduced to the system's XMB. Anyone attempting to connect to these services will get an error notification, or a message saying that the network is currently undergoing routine maintenance. At first, the company didn't say anything besides that the network would be down for a short bit and that they were working as fast as they could to resolve it. Finally, a spokesman for Sony posted an explanation on the official Playstation blog, though they still didn't give an estimated time as to when PSN will be back up. Here is what it they had to say...
"An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services. In order to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward, we turned off PlayStation Network & Qriocity services on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th. Providing quality entertainment services to our customers and partners is our utmost priority. We are doing all we can to resolve this situation quickly, and we once again thank you for your patience. We will continue to update you promptly as we have additional information to share." - Patrick Seybold, Sr. Director, Corporate Communications and Social Media
Now that it has been more than the two days that Sony initially hoped it would take to fix and the outage continues into the weekend, questions are being asked. Is this the work of Anonymous, a relatively well-known hacker group that has been known to have bad blood with the company? How will the Sony compensate Playstation Plus members who will not be able to connect? That is paid time we are talking about. PSN itself is a free service, but gamers can subscribe to PS Plus to receive early access to betas, free game downloads, dynamic themes, and more for a yearly rate of fifty dollars. Also, certain online titles require a monthly service charge, such as the recently released DC Universe Online. It will be interesting to see how Sony handles these concerns. Any updates will be posted as soon as we hear more.
For what it's worth, when I initially read the title of this post it read, "PSN Outrage extends into holiday weekend."
ReplyDeleteAnonymous takes credit for the handiwork, not unlike lovable terrorists. Are they taking credit for this?
No, they actually have said on their site that they "actually didn't do it for once", though they did concede that it could have been a splinter group or individual working under the Anonymous name. Since that post though, I have heard rumors about their facebook status alluding that they DID in fact do it. They DO love hogging the spotlight, so maybe they are trying to take credit for it now even if it wasn't them. Who knows...Sony has since updated with another vague post saying they are still hard at work, but they refuse to give any information as to when the network will be back up and running. I do all my gaming on my PS3, and with the recent releases of Portal 2, MK, and Socom 4 I was having a blast gaming online until this happened. What a fiasco!
ReplyDelete- Ian @ NBD