Six days into the ongoing outages on the Playstation Network, the exact cause of the outage remains in dispute, and no one knows precisely when PSN will get back online.
Sony spokesperson Satoshi Fukuoka has blamed an “external intrusion” into its system and announced that a “thorough investigation” was ongoing.
While Sony pins the blame on unspecified outside hackers, not everyone believes it.
AnonOps, everyone’s favorite cyber-troublemakers, has explicitly denied any official or concerted involvement, though they concede individual Anons may or may not have acted without official sanction. Instead, their press release pinned the blame on internal trouble with Sony’s servers and claimed any allegations of external hackers were the company taking advantage of prior bad history between Anonymous and Sony.
Redditor chesh420 offers another explanation, blaming a new custom firmware for retail Playstation 3 consoles that gave them the ability to operate like developer Ps3s and pirate content from the network. Though chesh420 admits their proposal is speculation, they argue a convenient series of events (as detailed in the link) provides plausible evidence.
Whatever the reason for the downtime, director Patrick Seybold has apologized to customers for not having a projected timeframe or ETA, but promised additional and necessary security additions to the service. As the extent of the attacks remains unknown, Sony has promised to inform any customers whose credit or personal information may have been compromised by the apparent hackers.
Header Image credit: Lampwall