For the first time in days, Sony has issued a formal response to the ongoing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) affecting various networks in the gaming industry, including PlayStation Network. While the update doesn't offer much in terms of when PlayStation owners can expect full service to resume, Sony has at least assured us that they are working to restore full network access.
Note: An update on Sony's official support page notes that service is restored on PS3 and Vita; however, PSN is still down on PS4. A special section of the website is dedicated to PSN post-restoration that says if you are continuing to experience problems after PSN services are fully restored to refer to Contact Support.
Here's the full message from Catherine Jensen, VP of SCEA Consumer Experience.
The video game industry has been experiencing high levels of traffic designed to disrupt connectivity and online gameplay. Multiple networks, including PSN, have been affected over the last 48 hours. PSN engineers are working hard to restore full network access and online gameplay as quickly as possible.
From time to time there may be disruptions in service due to surges in traffic, but our engineers will be working to restore service as quickly as possible.
If you received a PlayStation console over the holidays and have been unable to log onto the network, know that this problem is temporary and is not caused by your game console. We’ll continue to keep you posted on Twitter at @AskPlayStation and we’ll update this post once the problems subside.
Thanks again for your patience.
The DDoS attacks on PSN (and Xbox LIVE) began around Christmas Day. Though neither Sony nor Microsoft admitted to being DDoS'd, the notorious hacker group Lizard Squad was eager to claim credit. For those unfamiliar, this is the same group that launched multiple attacks earlier this year, including bomb threats to SOE president John Smedley.
On Friday, one of the numerous Twitter accounts claiming to be Lizard Squad said the DDoS attacks were stopped and that any ongoing disruptions were "just the aftermath" of hours worth of traffic bombardment. However, another account claiming to be one of the prominent members of Lizard Squad, continued to tweet out messages suggesting the DDoS attacks were continuing. Even now, two days after Christmas, PSN is still struggling to return to full service; although, some believe it to be Sony simply restructuring its system architecture.
At this point it's still not 100 percent certain if the outages are ongoing DDoS attacks, but it appears for now at least that Sony has a grasp on the problem and is working to restore service. Hopefully they are addressing the issues and even working to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. Considering this isn't the first time PSN has been brought down for a lenghty period, I'm hoping Sony will finally take some serious action in preventing this sort of outage again. But, I'm also skeptical; if they haven't learned by now, when will they?
