Sony's PlayStation Network Faces Second Day of Outages

Sony’s PlayStation Network, which provides PlayStation 3 users with downloadable games, movies and TV shows, says it may be another day or two before a network outage is resolved.

UPDATE: The PlayStation Network continues to be down with no estimated time for recovery.

The problems were first addressed on Wednesday on the PlayStation blog, and in a troubling update yesterday, Patrick Seybold, the company’s senior director of corporate communications and social media, said it could be another day or two before they are back online.

“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.”

A Sony spokesperson declined to comment further on the situation.

For now, while the outage corresponds with Amazon’s cloud difficulties, which has now been officially out for more than a day, there are no signs that there is any correlation between the two.

In fact, Sony’s outage is being blamed on Anonymous, the same hacker group involved in retaliation efforts surrounding the Wikileaks shutdown, because they were involved again earlier this month in shutdowns on various Sony sites, reports the Christian Science Monitor. It’s also plausible that something far less sinister, like routine maintenance, brought the network down.

Regardless, the outage is bad timing. Consumers are up in arms, as they were eager to play recent releases such as Mortal Kombat, Portal 2, SOCOM 4, and inFAMOUS 2′s beta release.

A user who goes by the name of mixedkidbx wrote: “WHAT???? MORTAL KOMBAT just came out and now i cant play online. I cant play 80% of my games that have online functions.” In another post, he added: “Right i got the inFAMOUS 2 beta too.”

The Sony PlayStation Network is similar to Xbox Live, and serves the same purpose of trying to extend the life of the console by adding new content via the Internet. It has 70 million registered accounts worldwide who have downloaded more than 1.4 billion pieces of content.

According to comments on the PlayStation blog, the platform is well used and is being missed. On average, at least two-thirds of PSN registrants play an online game once a week or more, and more than 70 percent of registrants make at least one purchase. In January, PSN reported its fifth highest month for revenue to date.