Denial of service attacks are frightful for internet dependent companies, hence Sony notably acknowledge the fact that a Playstation 4 without PSN access can ruin a high percentage of their players gameplay experiences. The last time PSN suffered a major outage was when group of hackers managed to access PSN servers and risked the safety of many PSN users personal information.
Sid Shuman who is in charge of media and digital communications for Playstation assured users who aren’t too aware of the consequences of the situation that “no personal information has been accessed”, without any further explanations other than the rather obvious:
“Like other major networks around the world, the PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network have been impacted by an attempt to overwhelm our network with artificially high traffic.
Although this has impacted your ability to access our network and enjoy our services, no personal information has been accessed.
We will continue to work towards fixing this issue and hope to have our services up and running as soon as possible.We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.”
As to how long this will take is unknown at this part of time, however you should be confident in that staff working in development of the Playstation Network will be working to their maximum limits in trying to resolve the DDOS attack and restoring the servers to a functional state for users to enjoy their experiences with their online capable Playstation consoles.
In other news, the DDOS attack seems to be connected to an actual terrorist threat aimed towards John Smedley, the president of Sony Online Entertainment, as an American Airline flight carrying the SOE President has been diverted after the “Lizard Squad” who are claiming responsibility for the DDOS attack are tweeting warning threats of a bomb in the cargo of the flight. What their actual reasoning for the feud with Sony is unknown at this point, but they have continuously been tweeting about this flight and this potential bomb, with the hashtag “#PrayForFlight362“.
Since then, Lizard Squad has tweeted a taunting question “Hey haven’t heard from you in an hour, is everything alright?”:
https://twitter.com/LizardSquad/status/503635801964421120
American Airlines haven’t provided a press release yet nor is Sony responding to anything so far, however with the American Airline website confirming that the flight has been delayed and John Smedley tweeting that his flight has been delayed for “security reasons”, there could be a legitimate truth as to what the ‘Lizard Squad’ are claiming.
UPDATE: According to Jason Schreier on Kotaku, an Sony Online Entertainment representative declined any detail on the investigations of this ‘terrorist threat’ case other than revealing the FBI are investigating the incident, so surely there will be more news to follow.
Additionally, John Smedley has spoken on Twitter “All is well”, following up stating “justice will find these guys”:
A bomb threat is a serious matter, and whether they truly are the people behind the DDOS attack or whether they’re just claiming the ‘throne’, they’ve taken matters too far which will most likely cause them to face a serious amount of punishment if caught.
UPDATE #2; It seems Playstation Network is now back and running, Sony has postponed its scheduled PSN maintenance which was planned for today due to the events of the DDOS attack, here’s Sonys official response on the PSN update blog post:
“The PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network are back online and people can now enjoy the services on their PlayStation devices. The networks were taken offline due to a distributed denial of service attack. We have seen no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorized access to users’ personal information.
In light of today’s issue, the networks will not undergo the regularly scheduled maintenance, which was planned for Monday, August 25. We will provide an update shortly for when the maintenance will be rescheduled.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by this issue. Thanks for your patience and support.”
yBaX |> PLAY 
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