If you’ve been playing your PS3 online over the last month you may noticed that the Playstation Network has been going offline quite a bit lately.
This has led to outrage on blogs, forums and even down the pub as many are now suspecting that the hacktivists Anonymous are behind the recent downtime.
Users across Europe and in the US have reported problems logging into the PlayStation Network this morning, and throughout the whole of this month.
The official EU PlayStation blog this morning informed users this was due to maintenance work, in a post on Twitter, and said updates on its progress would be available here.
No maintenance has been announced in advance, and this has led to speculation about the cause of the downtime – are Anonymous part taking in cyber terrorism again?
Anonymous launched a string of denial of service attacks against high-profile Sony sites earlier this month under the banner ‘OpSony’.
The action was in retaliation for Sony’s legal pursuit of hackers who opened up the its PlayStation 3 console to hackers, when Sony pursued the offenders who had their houses raided.
Users have begun to speculate that Sony is being targeted by cyber criminals, and there’s nothing that they can do from the looks of it. This is obviously incredibly annoying for customers who have spent money on games and then can’t play with their mates online.
“Something tells me this was unplanned maintenance”, wrote one user on PSN’s community forums.
Another said: “Something is seriously wrong with PSN since those attacks. I’d rather Sony get to the bottom of it with what ever means they need to.”
No announcements about today’s outage have yet been made via the usual Anonymous news channels.
We’ll keep tabs on this for you, but what do think of this new cyber threat ? Is fair that they ruining the gaming experience of almost every Playstation 3 gamer?