In a situation that for gamers is quickly growing to “Who shot JFK?” proportions, the PlayStation Network (PSN) — Sony’s answer to Xbox Live — was effectively killed by an external source sometime last Thursday, forcing Sony to completely rebuild the entire system. That’s five long days without the PlayStation Store and PS3-exclusive MMOs, which may as well be five months as far as PS3 gamers are concerned.
The question on everybody’s minds: who toppled PSN? Who could have perpetrated such an all-encompassing crime, catching Sony completely off guard and dismantling such a high-profile network so effectively? How in the world could Sony even allow their network to be open to an attack of this magnitude?
PlayStation’s launch of Portal 2 (not a PS3 exclusive, but still a big deal) was meant to be a high-profile affair, after Valve’s Gabe Newell made a surprise appearance on stage at E3 last year to announce that a much-anticipated Valve title would be coming to the PS3 for the first time. Portal 2 is also playable on PC and Xbox 360, so at least gamers have other means of playing through the game on other services. But for PS3 gamers, it just plain sucks.
And that’s just one title. Any number of others, particularly MMOs like DC Universe Online or PS3 exclusives with a big multiplayer component, like Killzone 3, are completely offline until Sony can resolve things. Which has to really suck for game developers, who are losing out on revenues from the outage, but have zero control over the situation.
Can you imagine something like this happening to Xbox Live, which boasts considerably more users than PSN? I can’t.
At this time, Sony has no estimates, and says it could still be quite a while, though they’re working as fast at rebuilding the system as humanly possible. Any bets on how long it will be before PSN is back up and running? I’m gonna guess at least three or four more days. If it’s any longer than that, some Sony heads are going to roll.
PSN went down late on Tuesday night / early Wednesday morning roughly 3:00 AM Pacific Time 4/20. It was up and I was playing online, got disconnected from PSN and then haven’t been able to login since. It’s currently 2:00 PM on Monday 4/25.
Hm. My information said it was Thursday, but I could certainly be wrong. Wednesday morning is even worse! I’m just astounded that a mega tech company like Sony could get caught with their pants down this way.
It was anonymous, duh
http://www.destructoid.com/sony-provides-status-update-on-playstation-network-199500.phtml
Sony posted on one of the blog’s, that the official time was Wednesday at around 9:30pm, PST, I believe. I know I was still able to play online Multiplayer until around 8PM or so on Wednesday night.
Also, for the “imagining of XBox Live going down,” it already happend a couple of years ago around 2007-2008. But it is a rarity, and I hope so is this issue with the PSN being down. I do not believe most people understand the time consumed, when rebuilding an ENTRIE network! I just hope that nothing regarding personal information was compromised!!!
Well, uhm … sure, Playstation Network uses the word “network” but in reality “Playstation Network” means “Sony’s authentication server(s) or service”. I’m almost 100% that Sony does not host all of the game servers for all PS3 games.
Oh. I distracted myself with my useless network / non-network comment sorry if that came off short; I didn’t intend it as such.
The point I wanted to make was that I doubt that Sony decided themselves to take PSN down in concern for the security of our personal data (which is what they are now claiming). It’s much more likely IMO that the black-hat hacker(s) did that for them…
Odd that it was up till around 8PM for you… Maybe it was up and down or available at different times in different geographical locations. The first post on the PSN blog about the outage was @ ~ 5:50 PM on Wednesday 4/20 (http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/20/update-on-psn-service-outages-2/) which was about 14 hours after I wasn’t able to connect to PSN.
I am annoyed at psn going down, but I hope they don’t lose too many customers. I think it’s either an incredibly overdevoted X-Box fan or Microsoft (I would never put it past them. Corporations can be vicious.) or a disgruntled customer, former employee, or a greedy hacker.