 "Sony Confirms External Invasion Suspends the PSN")
The 70 million registered gamers on the PlayStation Network are facing an outage which has lasted over 20 hours and is said that the downtime could continue for up to two days more. This outage comes hot on the heels of its previous outage which occurred at the beginning of this month. The DDoS attacks that started on April 6, 2011, were suspended after the hacker group Anonymous promised retaliation against Sony for perusing a lawsuit against file sharers on the network.
Back in 2006 when the PSN was launched, Sony confirmed that the service will always be connected, however over the last 20 odd hours, over 70 million users have been trying in vain to access the service leaving a whole lot of people very frustrated. Users are seeing error messages stating that the PSN is undergoing maintenance or is suspended.
PSN will be down for awhile… don’t loose hope
Initially no spokesperson from Sony was available for comment. On Friday however, through the PlayStation blog blog.us.playstation.com, Patrick Seybold, senior director of corporate communications and social media at Sony said, “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 and Qriocity services on the evening of Wednesday, April 20. 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."
It was thought that hacker group Anonymous was once again responsible for the PSN’s downtime but some reports are stating that they have denied it by saying on their website that, while it could be the case that other Anons have acted by themselves, AnonOps was not related to this incident and takes no responsibility for it. They also said that a more likely explanation is that Sony is taking advantage of their previous ill-will towards the company to distract users from the fact that this outage is actually an internal problem with the company’s servers.
However, hacker group Anonymous has already claimed that their next attack on Sony would be after the PSN was back online. Though, the hacker group made it clear that it would not be against the PSN.
Speculation is wild that the PSN outage could be linked to the Amazon.com AWS cloud services outage, which lasted 24 hours.
Sony thanked its users for their patience but it seems that the more than 70 million gamers would want something more than a mere apology.
For more details on the PSN saga, click here
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