That can't be good. Last night, the PlayStation Network fell down, and it can't get back up. Patrick Seybold, Sr. Director of Corporate Communication and Social Media, posted these words of encouragement on PlayStation.Blog:
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.
It could be worse. He could have posted something like; "The PSN is down? We didn't notice. Why didn't anybody tell us?" That would have been a problem. The outage isn't just in the U.S. Kotaku confirmed the PSN was down in Australia and Japan. Whether this is a technical issue or the work of hackers remains to be determined.
The outage comes on the heels of the release of SOCOM 4, a huge PS3 title that relies on the PSN for many features. This also eliminates any online co-op for Portal 2, which is a tragedy. The physical manifestation of the internet known as "Anonymous" has been taking credit for previous PSN interruptions. They have a beef with Sony concerning a lawsuit the mega corporation brought against another hacker. Their stance concerns ownership of digital media, and the ownership of things consumers pay for, etc. Oddly enough, their attacks stopped consumers from accessing a free service provided by a giant corporation. Or something like that. Real life is confusing. They claimed to have stopped the attacks, but the coincidence is remarkable. Hopefully, Sony will have the problem resolved soon.
4.22.2011 Here's the latest update from PlayStation Blog:
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.
"External intrusion?" Now that is a problem. Looks like the PSN is out of commision for the time being. We'll keep you updated.
4.25.2011 - Still no update from Sony, all we know is that they are currently "rebuilding the PlayStation Network servers." Sony also doesn't know if credit card data was comprimised yet.