PSN downtime persists, Sony still hush hush on why [update]
Update: Sony have now confirmed that the downtime is due to an “external intrusion on our system” but the who/what/why/how aspect still remains a mystery.
As most PS3 gamers have probably noticed by now, since yesterday the PSN has been experiencing major technical problems on an unprecedented level across all regions. It started off as just a few small minor nuisances, but things gradually got worse as time went on and now it’s almost impossible to log into the system at all. As usual Sony are being extremely vague about the issue, so all we know for sure at the moment is that it’s related to some sort of engineering problem over in Japan and that Sony are investigating “the possibility of targeted behaviour by an outside party”. Targeted behaviour by and outside party? Wow that sounds and awful lot like the friendly douche bags goons cyber thugs “activists” over at hacker group Anonymous, the same ones who were responsible for the very brief downtime the PSN experienced a few weeks back.
Supposedly the “leadership” of the group have publicly denied any involvement in the issue, which is a somewhat moot point considering Anonymous doesn’t really have a power structure and acts more as an Internet flash mob more than anything else. Then again physical sabotage isn’t really their style, and dwindling public support as meant their ability to disrupt Sony is at an all time low. Either way it’s all just speculation until we get some kind of official word from Sony themselves.
Besides, the more pressing question from consumers at the moment is “how long before the system is working again?”. Well all we’ve got on that is a vague assurance from Sony that “it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running”. 1 or 2 days might not sound like much especially when the PSN is free anyway, but this couldn’t have happened at a worse time. The newly released Portal 2, which currently has one of the highest ratings ever over on metacritic, was much hyped by both Valve and Sony over it’s ability to link up with Steam servers through the PSN for cross platform co-op as well as give Steam users with PSN accounts a free PC copy of the game.
As it stands none of those things can be done without first connecting to the PSN, so if you’re a PS3 gamer who didn’t register your copy of Portal 2 as soon as you got it then you’re currently stuck without a way to enjoy anything other than the (admittedly glorious) single player mode. To make maters worse the few PS3 owners not gaging for some Portal 2 co-op probably bought a copy of the well received Mortal Kombat instead, and are now desperate to eviscerate random strangers but have no means to (legally) do so. Fingers crossed this all gets sorted out before the fallout gets any worse.