Apr 21, 2011
As a Sony Playstation 3 owner and enthusiast it’s always saddening when something happens to rock the faith in the platform. The outages that have affected the Playstation Network recently (primarily attributed to DDOS attacks by Anonymous in retaliation to the copyright lawsuit made against George Hotz) have caused major disruption to thousands of gamers.
Although the PS3 itself and its ability to function as a gaming machine and media centre have not been affected, the online capability has been effectively shut down at the time of writing (April 21 2011). Numerous blogs and community sites have posted about the situation:
The official report from the Playstation blog is this:
While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running. Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this matter. Please stay tuned to this space for more details, and we’ll update you again as soon as we can.
Eventhubs.com posted that the outage may last two days, citing Patrick Seybold, the Sr. Director of Corporate Communications & Social Media for SCEA for the information
PlaystationLifestyle.net reported that although activist group ‘Anonymous’ claim innocence on this most recent attack it has been hinted that the perpetrators may be a splinter group operating independently of ‘Anonymous’.
Meanwhile PSU.com slants towards ‘emergency maintenance’ under the cloud of a threat of action from ‘Anonymous’.
Whatever the cause, there’s a running theme in that it’s being caused by a DDOS Anonymous related attack. Regardless of that it’s causing frustration for thousands of users and likely damaging Sony’s market share and image in the world of online gaming.
Ofcourse, PSN users do not pay for the online service unlike Xbox360 Live users, and so in many of the online communities the console wars are already well under way with the most prevalent comment being along the lines of “You get what you pay for”….. It is interesting that Xbox Live and Microsoft have either never been targeted in this way before, or maybe they have but have more robust counter measures in place.
If you have thoughts on the situation then I’d love to read them in the comments below.
Happy reading and keep on gaming.
Sony PlayStation 3 Slim Console (320 GB Model)
David Nicol is a gamer, blogger, podcaster and video creator based in the UK. Responsible for TBFmedia.com, thegamerscraic.com, backslashgaming.com and is articles editor at hupitgaming.com
