PlayStation users have had some issues connecting to Playstation Network PSN through early January but all systems are back now. PlayStation’s answer wasn’t clear or sufficient, but with the situation solved, now we can analyze what happened.
PlayStation Network resumed all operations the last 5th of January after several days with sporadic downtime and issues and a few hours of total interruption. All of this started a few days before Christmas, once a group of hackers announced through several message boards that they were planning attacks against PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, as it happens every year in these communities. The immediate answer from the Sony higher-ups was that they were “looking into the issues”, followed by total radio silence up until the first few hours of January 5th, when Shuhei Yoshida himself, president of SCE studios announced the problem was solved and users could play again, while offering apologies for the inconveniences.
PlayStation has kind of a rough story with this type of hacks when it comes to PlayStation Network, the system through which PlayStation users get to play online, connect with other players and buy games digitally. The most infamous case was the heavy security breach from 2011, which resulted on a 23 day cut of the service, along with the spread of user’s data such as login credentials or credit card data.
What does a gamer do in these situations? Apparently, play on PC, as it seems that while PSN was having problems, Steam achieved a new record of users logged in at the same time, with a peak of 12.332.000 simultaneous users when the previous peak last year had been of 9 millions. But, let’s be fair, it’s not like Steam didn’t have any issues this season, as a cache error made it possible for several users to log into other users account randomly. Valve themselves chose to not comment on the situation except to deny that it they were the targets of an organized attack and to ease the users explaining no one could shop or trade from these accounts.
Whatever the case may be, whether you’re using Playstation Network, Xbox Live or Steam, we recommend changing your passwords and to avoid saving credit card data on your consoles or computers. Happy gaming!
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