[UPDATE: The news got way worse after I wrote this.]
I’m not a PlayStation Network member, or much of a gamer at all. But I’m kind of fascinated by Internet outages–and the one currently affecting Sony’s PlayStation Network and Qriocity service is one for the record books. In fact, it may be the worst one of all time, if you multiply the number of people impacted by the hours of the outage. And it continues on, with no evidence that it’s going to end soon. (Sony, which blithely said it might last for a day or two at first, is no longer making any predictions.)
[UPDATE: Some commenters have rightly reminded me of the two-week Xbox Live outage back in 2008–a less interesting, but lengthier (so far!) service interruption.)
A very basic timeline of events to date:
- In January, Sony sued jailbreaking guru George Hotz and others over a PlayStation jailbreak that permitted the installation of unapproved apps.
- On April 4th, the online shadow army known as “Anonymous,” upset over Sony’s lawsuit against PlayStation hacker George Hotz, managed to use denial-of-service attracks to take down PlayStation.com.
- On April 11th, Sony settled with Hotz.
- On Wednesday of last week, Sony’s PlayStation Blog said that the company was aware “certain functions” of the PlayStation Network were down.
- On Thursday, it said that it might be “a full day or two” before things got back to normal.
- On Friday, it said that an “external intrusion” had impacted PSN and Qriocity services, and that it had shut them off until it could ensure “smooth and secure” operation.
- Also on Friday, Anonymous denied that it had caused the outage.
- On Saturday, it said that it was undertaking a “time-consuming” rebuilding of its network infrastructure.
- On Monday, it said that it was working to restore the services “quickly,” but had no information about how long it would be until they returned.
- Today’s Tuesday, so if the outage persists for another day, it’ll have gone on for a week. I can’t think of any major Internet service that’s been toast for so long.