As the story goes, Sony voluntarily brought down the PlayStation Network last Wednesday in reaction to a security breach:
An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services. In order to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward, we turned off PlayStation Network & Qriocity services.
Unfortunately, no one knows when the PSN will be up once again and Sony’s not saying. In fact, their most recent blog update doesn’t provide much hope of a timely resolution:
We are working around the clock to bring [the PSN] back online. Our efforts to resolve this matter involve re-building our system to further strengthen our network infrastructure.
Wow, rebuilding the network on the fly? I wouldn’t be surprised if PSN is down a few more days… The timing probably hasn’t been the best, given so many schools on Spring Break. With the PS3 Call of Duty, Black Ops addicts appearing to suffer the most. And some members are also rightly concerned with PSN credit card security. But, thus far, Sony hasn’t indicated we have anything to worry about in that regard. Lastly, we’re hearing mixed reports on Netflix PS3 access during the outage, with some simply clicking past the alerts to enable video streaming.
In other news, things are just peachy here on Xbox Live. Portal 2 co-op, anyone?