PR disaster
Sony's online gaming service, PlayStation Network (PSN), as well as is media streaming service, Qriosity, have been down for almost a week. It turns out this is due to a massive hack, which has potentially leaked the personal details of all users of the services, including credit card details.
Sony came clean about the nature of the attack yesterday, and has faced heavy criticism for not advising users of the danger sooner. In response to queries about the delay between identifying the problem and communicating with its customers, Sony recently issued the following statement:
"There's a difference in timing between when we identified there was an intrusion and when we learned of consumers' data being compromised. We learned there was an intrusion 19th April and subsequently shut the services down. We then brought in outside experts to help us learn how the intrusion occurred and to conduct an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the incident. It was necessary to conduct several days of forensic analysis, and it took our experts until yesterday to understand the scope of the breach. We then shared that information with our consumers and announced it publicly yesterday evening."
Sony has also published the email it has sent to all customers of the two services - thought to be in the region of 70 million people, and set up an FAQ page, which includes local query numbers.
The network outage was already a source of considerable embarrassment to Sony, but the potential loss of all this personal data is a PR disaster. If you're a PSN customer we'd like to hear your thought on this development, and how well you think Sony has handled it.
