A Disaster In The Making? Sony’s PlayStation Network Suffers Prolonged Global Outage 
Sony’s PlayStation Network,
its online service for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles,
suffered from a major outage today, which remains ongoing. According to
Sony’s blog, the interruption in service may last into the long weekend — for at least
another “full day or two”. The Sony Network currently has more than 70 million registered users,
many of whom have taken to Twitter and other social networks to express their frustration
over the prolonged downtime. Millions of unhappy gamers (and Netflix customers) a PlayStation outage makes.
Not to mention, the outage comes on the same day that Amazon’s cloud-based web services crashed,
taking Reddit, Foursquare, and Quora (among others) with them.
Unfortunately, it seems that today has become a fairly drastic example
of the vulnerability of the cloud and the extent to which these outages
can effect business-as-usual on the Web.
But, as per Sony’s downtime: At this point, the network has been out
of commission for over 20 hours, and it has been 16 hours since Sony
last posted updates to its blog or Twitter account. So, the root cause
of the problem remains unclear. So far, the only update Sony has blasted
out to its users is this message:
“While we are investigating the
cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a
full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up
and running. Thank you very much for your patience while we work to
resolve this matter. Please stay tuned to this space for more details,
and we’ll update you again as soon as we can”. The acknowledgement that there is indeed a widespread problem is
admirable, but the company’s vague handling of public relations leaves
something to be desired. Especially considering the fact that, several
hours before, Sony released a statement through its EU blog, saying that
the network outage may be a result of
“targeted behaviour by an outside party”, bringing the possibility of cyberattacks into play. Adding to the
confusion is the fact that the message has since been removed.
This message, along with the lack of updates or details regarding the
outage has led to speculation across the Web that this was potentially
the result of attacks by the infamous hacker consortium, Anonymous.
Earlier this month, the “hactivist” group launched what it called
“Operation: Sony”, in which it employed Denial of Service attacks to
take down the parts of the PlayStation Network. The move was hotly
debated within Anonymous and was met with criticism from gamers, because
it marked the first time the group didn’t simply attack an
organization’s main site — and because the coup had a very real effect
on consumers — the very people Anonymous claims to support.
Since then, Anonymous has called for a near-term “cease fire”
in relation to the PlayStation Network, and it has largely kept its
word. In response to today’s outage, the group maintained its innocence
on its Facebook page.
The Examiner.com reported that Anonymous’ original beef with the
company began “with Sony’s court case against George Hotz, which has
since been settled out of court”. Sony sued Hotz for jailbreaking the
PS3 and posting the videos of his hack and links to the third party
software on YouTube. This led to the creation of “Operation: Sony”.
However, in relation to today’s network outage, Anonymous has not yet
officially denied responsibility for the attack, nor has it taken credit
for it.
Thus, it could be the case that members within Anonymous acted
without consent from the majority, and therefore the band of hackers
does not wish to take responsibility. Or, on the other hand, 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.
Whatever the cause, there’s no doubt the outage has been a disaster in the making for Sony.
Its Network has experienced several outages in recent weeks,
which has become a cause for concern among the company’s faithful. And,
what’s more, today’s outage is already far more widespread (and of a
much longer duration) than its previous hiccups.
Sony may not be aware of the exact problem (maybe it’s a glitch in an
update or Steam integration issues), but as we near 24 hours of a
global outage that affects millions of people, you’d think the company
would
at least be able to determine if the problem were due to
internal or external factors. Being more open about these things, even
though it might involve enduring a black eye, would be smart for public
relations — and good for business.
We will update as we learn more. Stay tuned.
Fonte : techcrunch.com - Citação :
- Sony’s PlayStation Network,
its online service for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles,
suffered from a major outage today, which remains ongoing. According to
Sony’s blog, the interruption in service may last into the long weekend — for at least another “full day or two”
Assunto: Mais de 75 milhões de jogadores não conseguem aceder ao servico online da PS3 
Qui Abr 21, 2011 2:32 pm
