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Sorry PSN users, news on Easter Sunday is not good. With another update on the PlayStation blog, Sony identify the cause as an ‘external intrusion’ as the outage enters its third day.
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 20th. 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. We will continue to update you promptly as we have additional information to share.
While on the surface the downtime just seems like a major inconvenience, especially to new Portal 2 owners, but in reality some users are paying for PlayStation Plus. Complaining when a free service is down is one thing, complaining about not getting a service your paying for is entirely another.
While Sony doesn’t commit to any service level agreements, you can be sure this outage will affect subscriber numbers. Also spare a thought for anyone who rented a movie the day before the outage and was charged for something they couldn’t watch. Hopefully Sony gets on top of the issue soon and things can return to normal, but you can be sure there’ll be claims for compensation that arise as a result the shut down.
Sony’s revenues will also be significantly impacted as a result of this, every hour that goes by is costing them revenue. Everything from rented movies, margins on games and add-on content, purchased items in HOME and revenue from music service Qriocity are all frozen since Thursday. It is likely this shut down as a result of the intrusion / hacking / botnet is likely to cost Sony hundreds of thousands of dollars. For the perpetrators of the attack, I hope you covered your tracks, the Sony lawyers will be on your doorstep.
More information @ PlayStation blog.
