Sony’s PlayStation, Qriocity network down; hackers' group denies hand

Sony’s PlayStation and Qriocity network services went down over the long weekend, even as a hacker group it crossed paths with denied involvement in the incident. PlayStation corporate communications and social media senior director Patrick Seybold said the outage stemmed from an “external intrusion." “An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services. In order to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward, we turned off PlayStation Network & Qriocity services on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th," he said in a blog post. He did not give a definite timetable on when the services would be resumed, but said they are doing “all we can to resolve this situation quickly." In an earlier blog post, he had said it may be “a full day or two" before they could get the service completely back up and running. “Providing quality entertainment services to our customers and partners is our utmost priority. We are doing all we can to resolve this situation quickly, and we once again thank you for your patience. We will continue to update you promptly as we have additional information to share," he said. But Anonymous, a group of hackers that crossed paths with Sony for suing “hacktivist" George Hotz, said it was not involved in this incident. Hotz was slapped a lawsuit by Sony for making public the root keys of Sony’s PlayStation 3 console. Still, in a post on the AnonNews site, Anonymous admitted the possibility its individual members may have acted on their own. “While it could be the case that other Anons have acted by themselves, AnonOps was not related to this incident and does not take responsibility for whatever has happened. A more likely explanation is that Sony is taking advantage of Anonymous’ previous ill-will towards the company to distract users from the fact that the outage is actually an internal problem with the company’s servers," it said. — LBG, GMA News