PSN down for unknown reasons, Sony investigating

If you tried to fire up your PS3 and go onto the PSN last night and today, you have undoubtedly noticed that the network is down. This is an irritation to all PS3 users even if you don't play games that require the network since many of them will constantly ask you if you want to connect to the network. I know Gran Turismo 5 nearly drove me crazy asking last night when I realized the network was down. The interesting part about this outage is that Sony apparently has no idea what caused it.

Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold wrote on the official Playstation Blog, "While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we're able to get the service completely back up and running." This means that over the long Easter weekend you are likely to be without any trophy gathering capability. In GT5, that alone means no online racing or online car dealership.

Apparently, in Europe Sony has noted that it is investigating the possibility that the network was taken down by an outside party. The PSN outage could very well be the result of an attack from a hacker group like anonymous. The timing is even worse in that this is the launch weekend for SOCOM 4 and the game is heavily focused on the online play aspects. There will be a lot of unhappy gamers the next few days.

[via PC World]