A mysterious outage hit the PlayStation Network last night, inconveniently coinciding with the release of a certain highly-anticipated game. The PSN is still down, and Sony has issued a statement regarding the outage:
While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running. Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this matter. Please stay tuned to this space for more details, and we’ll update you again as soon as we can.
The PSN outage was confirmed to be an international matter, as consoles around the world experienced the issue.
Not too long ago, hacker group Anonymous declared war on Sony, claiming responsibility for attacks on the PSN, but has since ceased the attacks as they claimed to realize their attacks would harm innocent fans attempting to use the service. Could this outage be the work of cells within Anonymous? The outage also coincides with the PSN’s Steam integration, the first time Steam has hit gaming consoles, which could possibly be part of the problem. Sony is being a little mysterious as to the origin of the current outage, and now speculates that their service may be out for a couple days–something that doesn’t exactly happen too often without multiple warnings and reassurances from Sony. They have also not stated which functions are expected to be down over the next couple of days.
Whatever the cause, this is a highly inopportune time for the PSN to experience issues, as it comes on the heels of the launch of one of the most highly-anticipated games in recent memory, which just so happens to have the major selling point of deep online functionality.
(PlayStation.Blog via Kotaku)
