PSN is still down, and Sony is still keeping quiet about what’s causing it.
If you were hoping to spend the Easter weekend playing on your PS3, you might want to stick with single player games thanks to Sony’s ongoing network problems. Sony’s Patrick Seybold has posted on the official PlayStation blog, saying that it might be a day or two before PSN is back up and running.
Seybold thanked PS3 owners for their patience, and said that he would keep them updated with any new information. Sony is yet to reveal the cause of these outages, although yesterday Sony’s James Gallagher wrote on the European PlayStation blog that it might be the result of a third party deliberately targeting the service and attempting to bring it down. His post has since been edited and now also sports a warning that the service might be offline for an extended period.
If a third party really is causing the outages, the most likely candidate would seem to be Anonymous, which has recently attacked Sony for its actions against hacker George Hotz. As part of “Operation Sony,” the group assaulted Sony-owned websites with denial of service of service attacks. PSN was also affected, but Anonymous later apologized for this and said it would leave the service alone in the future.
Unfortunately, Anonymous is not one cohesive whole, as demonstrated by a splinter group that was gathering up personal information like addresses and phone numbers about Sony executives and people involved in the trial for harassment purposes. This group is also interested in the families of those involved, with one member lamenting that no one had found any information on Sony CEO Howard Stringer’s children. It’s not outside the realms of possibility that some other group has decided to attack PSN directly.
Whatever the reason it’s down, hopefully, the service will be back up and running sooner rather than later, and the two-day warning is just a worst-case scenario.
Source: PlayStation Blog
