Sony’s PlayStation Network mysteriously went down a couple of days ago, with Sony delivering the horrifying news that the network could be down for a few days following the beginning of the outage, depriving everyone of the wonderful co-op modes of a couple of recently released, highly anticipated titles. Over on the PlayStation Knowledge Base, Sony has posted the cause behind the network’s outage, an “external intrusion” that caused Sony to shut off their network as a safety precaution while they investigate.
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.
Sony also notes that if one logs into the PSN and sees a message saying “The PlayStation Network has been suspended,” this doesn’t mean one’s account has been suspended, so do not fret if greeted with said message.
Sony has not yet identified the origin of the “external intrusion,” otherwise known has a hack. The main theory is that hacker group Anonymous is behind the attacks, as they declared war on Sony only a few weeks ago, but have claimed they stopped their attacks, as they wouldn’t want to ruin the enjoyment of innocent gamers trying to connect to the PSN. The hacker group also released a statement claiming they have nothing to do with this current outage, though the popular theory is that an offshoot of the group has decided to continue with the attacks and they are the ones behind the outage.
The PSN isn’t exactly the first major online gaming service to have a few days worth of trouble, and the outage of the network only means people have to play their games offline and stream their movies on some other device until the issue is resolved, so the outage isn’t exactly the end of the gaming world, though it is a little inconveniently timed.
(PlayStation Knowledge Center via TechCrunch)
