PlayStation Network still down due to ‘external intrusions’, service might return by Tuesday

The PlayStation Network had an outage since Wednesday and there’s no guarantee of when it will return. Sony in a statement refers to an ‘external intrusion’ that lead to this disruption of service but other than that, no more details are given as to what really happened, at least officially. Inside sources from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) is reporting that the attacks are greater that what Sony is telling. That source is telling that PSN suffered a LOIC attack (with LOIC being a network attack application that causes a Denial-of-Service, DoS) an this crippled their servers — with the particular ones affected holding account information as well as Admin accounts.

Sony has shut down the service and is now in the process of restoring its backups. The source also says that the Japanese severs may be up by tomorrow and those in the US and Europe by possibly Tuesday. Theories to the reason of this attack have surfaced, including an organized attack from hacker group Anonymous — which has denied the accusation. As for the other end of the Spectrum (i.e. the Xbox), Microsoft has released this statement:

“Of course it’s regretful that Sony is encountering issues at such a busy time, and Microsoft takes no joy in the problems gamers are having playing their favorite games online. That being said, we are expecting Microsoft’s robust online network to see an increase of traffic from those gamers who own both systems. Being able to play their games via the Xbox Live network could make all the difference for some gamers.”