The official U.S. PlayStation blog, previously disrupted in April by a DDoS attack carried out by Anonymous members before a larger and more sophisticated assault (for which the group has since denied credit) effectively brought down Sony's entire online infrastructure, suffered spotty service in Japan this week.
Today Sony disproved a report which alleged a cyber attack had rendered the site unavailable for non-U.S. residents.
Bloomberg said hackers had played a part in the site's outage. Sony spokesperson Dan Race dismissed the report as inaccurate, however, and disclosed the more pedestrian cause for the service issues to Reuters.
"Media reports claiming that the U.S. PlayStation.com site and blog were partially disrupted because of hackers are false," Race said. "We installed a new security measure that has temporarily made the sites inaccessible to select regions outside of the U.S."
Bloomberg's original story has since been corrected.
The news follows a rough weekend for Sony during which hackers published the decade-old names and addresses of around 2,500 Sony sweepstakes entrants at one of its unused sites.
The PlayStation Network, which boasts approximately 77 million users worldwide, has now been down for three weeks. Around 100 million users total have been affected by the global service outage, with an unknown amount of personal information leaked in the attack.
Sony's latest update on PSN restoration says no exact date has been finalized. The company has already missed its previously set goals for the service's re-launch.
For its part, Sony has launched numerous goodwill missions over the past two weeks, offering customers identity theft protection, free games, access to PS Plus services and, of course, their sincerest apologies. Based on recent comments, it may need to focus on mending fences with aggrieved game developers, too.
