PSN Down Again – Reasons for Outage Unclear

Sony’s Playstation network has suffered another outage, similar to the ones that occurred at the beginning of the month. The DDoS attacks that started on April 6, 2011, were suspended after the “activist” group Anonymous promised retaliation against Sony for perusing a lawsuit against file sharers on the network. The denial of service attacks from earlier in April were met by controversy. It was the first time one of their DDoS attacks had a real effect on consumers, despite the fact that Anonymous has always firmly stated they had banded together to protect consumers from so-called “corporate greed”.

The new outage on the PSN comes only hours after Amazon’s cloud-based web services crashed, taking down popular networks like Quora, Foursquare, and Hootsuite. As of this morning, Amazon continues to struggle with getting the capacity back up to where it needs to be. An update on the AWS Dashboard stated, “We continue to make progress in restoring volumes … We will continue to update this status and provide a time frame when available.” As of 1:58AM on Friday morning, Amazon had called for all hands on deck to add capacity to affected servers.

The chaos continued into Thursday night, in what seems to be a suspiciously timed attack on the PSN, after several new games were launched. The PlayStation blog has already notified consumers that it could be a day or two before they are back up and running.

The “hacktivist” group Anonymous has not claimed responsibility for either of the two attacks and instead are denying any involvement on their Facebook page.

{Via: TechCrunch}