Just before the Easter weekend we reported that the Playstation Network had gone down. It remained down all throughout the weekend and now as workers have their last day off and their last chance to get some online action, Sony has let them down again and for the fifth day the service is offline. 4 Chan's hacktivist group Anonymous had been blamed despite a Playstation EU statement blaming the disruption on maintenance. Maintenance on the Easter weekend, really?
Obviously there's more to the story that Sony are letting on? Of course there is, contrary to Europe, Playstation US (on April 23rd) confirmed that an outside attack had caused the Network outage and that the network had to be 'rebuilt.'
Sony said: “We will announce through our websites as soon as there are any updates. We are currently investigating to determine the cause of this outage and are working to restore and maintain the services. Since this is an overall security related issue, we will not be providing further commentary for this case.”
Anonymous has denied responsibility for the attack but some point the finger at individual members of the group. Whoever it was, it was a well-timed attack. Not only did the network fall at the Easter break which would have been a massively popular weekend for online gaming but the day of the alleged 'attack' Portal 2 had been launched with PC cross-platform play via Steam.
You can't really blame Sony if indeed the problems are the result of an attack but that doesn't mean there won't be a tonne of furious gamers. Furious gamers who are probably on Ebay buying a 360.