April, 2011 Archives

If you thought not being able to play Portal 2 with your friends online was bad, things have just gotten a lot worse.

According to the Sony PlayStation blog, “certain PlayStation Network and Qriocity service user account information was compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized intrusion”.

Speaking plainly, hackers have likely obtained personal details for all users registered on PSN, including “name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID.” Sony also states that it “cannot rule out the possibility” that credit card data may have also been captured.

FixYa is receiving a major influx of questions from distraught gamers. The source of their angst? The Playstation Network is down, and may be offline for as long as the next couple of days. Those two days may seem like an eternity to gamers who are clamoring for answers as to how this happened.

Almost immediately, there was speculation that this was due to the network being hacked by activist group Anonymous, who has been protesting Playstation and had threatened that larger attacks were yet to come. However, according to their posts on Operation Sony’s Facebook page, Anonymous was not responsible for the current outage.