After nearly a week without service, we still don’t know what’s wrong with Sony’s digital platform.
If you’ve got a PS3, then you’ve probably noticed that the PlayStation Network is still offline, and there’s still no timeline for the return of the service. Earlier today, Sony issued a statement to report that there’s still nothing to report, although the company has said that an “external intrusion” is responsible for the problem. They’ve consequently decided to rebuild their entire infrastructure in order to prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future.
“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 20
,” reads a story on the PlayStation blog. “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.”
It’s not yet clear who’s responsible for the attack, although Anonymous – the hacker collective that sparred with Sony earlier in the month – has denied any involvement in the situation. Anonymous has also suggested that, “A more likely explanation [for the outages] is that Sony is taking advantage of Anonymous’ previous ill-will towards the company to distract users from the fact that the outage is actually an internal problem with the company’s servers.”
While I don’t buy the conspiracy theory, Sony spokesperson Satoshi Fukuoka says that the company is conducting a “thorough investigation” into the source of the outage and they don’t know whether or not their users’ personal and credit card information has been compromised. That’s a far more serious security concern than a weekend of lost gaming, so you have to hope that Sony is able to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.
Sony has promised to provide an update as soon as they have more information.
