PSN remains offline - Sony blames hackers, Anonymous denies responsibility

Last week's speculation that the service's failure was due to a malicious intrusion, however, was confirmed on Friday when Seybold wrote:

"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."

According to Seybold, the length of the outage is the result of Sony "re-building" PSN to strengthen its infrastructure, presumably to protect it from further attacks. Though the obvious assumption is that Anonymous, the 'hacktivist' group which took issue with Sony's recent PS3 modding trial, was responsible for the "external intrusion," at least one segment of the uncentralized group denied responsibility in a statement over the weekend:

"Whilst it could be the case that other Anons may have acted by themselves, AnonOps was not related to this incident, and does not take responsibility for whatever has happened.

A more likely explanation 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."

Whoever dunnit, let's hope that Sony's "re-building" effort results in a more secure and stable PSN, and are finished soon. A few days is one thing, but for the PS3's entire online infrastructure to be kaput all weekend is maddening, especially just after the release of Portal 2 and its Steam integration.

Apr 25, 2011