On Wednesday the PlayStation Network (PSN) experienced unscheduled downtime of more than 7 hours in multiple regions. Users in both the United States and Europe reported PSN as down with the service finally coming back online at around 6pm EST in the United States.
The PlayStation Europe Twitter account was the first to acknowledge the outage with the U.S. Twitter account following an hour later with a message saying, "We're aware that some of you are having issues trying to log into PSN. We're working to resolve the issue, and we'll update you here."
The PlayStation European Twitter account was actually much more frequent with updates though they were cryptic and never explained the cause of the downtime. "PSN is currently down. We are working on bringing the service back up asap. we'll keep you updated." That message was followed with a tweet indicating the service outage would continue for an undetermined amount of time, "PlayStation Network engineers are working hard on restoring the service. However, we have no news on when it will be back online."
Users reacted quickly and harshly. @OfficialCYOU2 said, "@PlayStationEU Do you guys EVER wonder why people buy other games consoles apart from yours? Your servers cause too much hassle to gamers! "
The negative backlash to an unplanned outage is likely a reaction to the hacking incident back in April which brought down the PSN and resulted in the personal information of all of it's account holders being compromised. Twitter user @Harperlarp tweeted, "@PlayStationEU So have you been hacked again? If so is our information safe this time? We deserve to know why it's down."
So far Sony has been completely quiet about the cause of the outage, not even posting on the official blogs. Right now the service has been restored in all regions and users are once again online playing games. It will be interesting to see if Sony addresses the service interruption or simply goes about its business without so much as a blog post on the matter.
