PlayStation Network downtime approaching third day

If you’re the owner of a PlayStation 3 connected to the PlayStation Network, you’ve probably had a frustrating couple of days. Since some time around early Thursday morning, the PSN has seen a complete global outage, with customers trying to log on getting a ‘80710A06’ error message. Since the sorry saga began, there’s been only a single update from Sony’s U.S. arm:

“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. Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this matter.”

And, earlier today, the European blog added that Sony wasn’t ruling out “targeted behavior by an outside party”:

“Our support teams are investigating the cause of the problem, including the possibility of targeted behaviour by an outside party. If the reported Network problems are indeed caused by such acts, we would like to once again thank our customers who have borne the brunt of the attack through interrupted service.”

Posters to message boards across the ‘net are inevitably pointing the finger at Anonymous. The ‘hacktivist’ group ‘declared war’ on Sony earlier this month for its lawsuit against PS3 hacker George ‘Geohot’. However, Anonymous has since promised it will halt all attacks on PSN, as it is “not aiming to attack customers of Sony.”

Whatever’s behind the outage, it’s come at a bad time for PlayStation gamers; Portal 2, Mortal Kombat, and SOCOM 4 were all released this week, and all with online multiplayer modes.

[Via PlayStation Blog]