Following the spectacular failure of Amazon.com Inc.’s Elastic Cloud Compute service last Thursday, another giant Web service, Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Network, has crashed and is showing no signs of coming back up soon.
The network, boasting about 70 million users worldwide, has apparently been floored by an “external intrusion” and has been offline since around the same time Amazon.com’s service went down. It was initially thought the two may be linked, however Sony has since updated its official blog with more details:
“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 & Qriocity services on the evening of Wednesday, April 20. Providing quality entertainment services to our customers and partners is our utmost priority. We are doing all we can to resolve this situation quickly, and we once again thank you for your patience.”
Qriocity is Sony’s on-demand media service, closely tied to the PlayStation Network.
For PlayStation owners hoping to take advantage of the long weekend to do some gaming, the outage could hardly come at a worse time. The downtime is also preventing Netflix Inc. customers from accessing their instant streaming service.
The perpetrators were initially thought to be Web rascals Anonymous, who have been hostile to Sony since the electronics giant set their legal attack dogs on hacker George Hotz for breaking the PlayStation’s encryption, however the group have denied they are behind the attack.
Regardless of the motivation behind the attack or the cause of the downtime, like Amazon.com, Sony is going to have a lot to answer for when the dust settles.
