‘External Intrusion’ causing PSN downtime, Anonymous denies responsibility

Currently the PlayStation Network, which boasts about 75 million users, is available to no one and has not been since Wednesday.

Sony has been largely quiet on the unprecedented downtime, but now they’ve let loose some new intelligence on the matter.

In a post on the official PlayStation Blog, SCEA senior director of corporate communications and social media Patrick Seybold said that an “External intrusion” is to blame.

“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,” he said.

As for a possible time table as to when the service will come back? Not so much.

“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.”

One hacking group claiming to be innocent is Anonymous, who wrote a news story recently titled, “For Once We Didn’t Do It.”

“While it could be the case that other Anons have acted by themselves, AnonOps was not related to this incident and does not take responsibility for whatever has happened. A more likely explanation is that Sony is taking advantage of Anonymous’ previous ill-will towards the company to distract users from the fact that the outage is actually an internal problem with the company’s servers.”

Well, now we know that last bit is not true, as Sony has confirmed it was an outside attack. This situation is quite quickly becoming very interesting.