Sony Blames PlayStation Outage on "External Intrusion"

Sony’s PlayStation Network was likely taken down by hackers and is not a victim of Amazon’s cloud services, which coincidentally faced widespread outages at the same time.

The PlayStation network, which allows people to play games online and watch TV and stream other content, continues to be down after three days. The attack has also affected Sony’s Qriocity services, which provides streaming video and music to various Sony products.

It’s unclear when the two services will come back online. UPDATE: The PlayStation Network continues to be down with no estimated time for recovery.

A statement posted late yesterday to the PlayStation blog blames the outage on an “external intrusion”:

“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.”

Earlier this month, the PlayStation.com website was attacked by the distributed hacking group Anonymous, which is well known for trying to take down various web sites for their involvement in the Wikileaks scandal.

The group was reportedly angry at Sony after it sued two PlayStation 3 owners for releasing code that allows third-party software and operating systems to run on the console, reports ComputerWorld.

Anonymous has said it has nothing to do with the current problems.