It is no big news that the PSN was down for a considerable 3 weeks. And while it is now up for the most part, the incident may have left a bad taste in some people's mouths. So, let me talk about for a moment my take on the outage and where SONY is going to be from now on.
I recall the day PSN went out as something of a "Eh, no biggie" to me. For one thing I thought the outage would only last a few days, and that it was due to maintaneance, or even better maybe they were making improvments to the infastructure and stuff like that (faster downloads would be nice). It was, however, the day after I received Mortal Kombat and Portal 2 for PS3 via Gamefly. Now, I admit that the only thing I lost by having PSN down was my ability to play these games online, which I dont do much of anyway. And its not like I could have redeemed the PC version of Portal 2 from a PS3 rental since the code is only good for purcahsed copies of the game. However, it was a tad inconveinant and I mostly missed messaging my friends about how they were enjoying the games. We also have to remember that this weekend was a three day weekend since it was Easter on that sunday, so having PSN down was a major bummer for many who wanted to play their PS3s online during the break.
However, little did we know that this was no simple maintaneance, but a far greater debacle.
I remember on that following tuesday I was getting ready for my karate class at my college and I checked my twitter feed to see what my followed people were up to. Then I remembered seeing a explosion of tweets about how SONY released a press release about how they had to pull down PSN due to a "External Intrusion" which is basicaly fancy talk for "We done got hacked". It was then revealed that the party that hacked the network had access to any users real name, address, email, passwords, and possibly even credit card details, something that even until today is contested. Basicaly, hackers got your info and could potentialy use your credit card to buy a bentley in florida. so not good news.
It would then be about 24 days later until PSN would be back up in any form. Right now we have everything back up except the PS Store, which is one of the main thing people will use on PSN. Thats rumored to be coming back up on tuesday.
But, lets talk about the future. Whats in store for SONY now? Well, in the short term this is bad news bears for them. They are going to have to deal with trust issues now with some of their users and try to win back their good will. They are attempting to do this with their "Welcome Back"program which nabs you 2 PS3 games of your choice out of 5, 2 PSP games out of your choice of 5, 30 days free of PS Plus if you are a non existing member of it, 60 days if you are a existing member, and 30 days free of their Quriocity music service to exisiting and non existing members (I think this deal is pretty decent considering its all free)
However, in the long term I dont think this will have a whole lot of impact. People on the internet have severly bad short term memory and this will likely pass by realtively soon. SONY will still make a PS4, people will buy it, theyll continue to make games, people will continue to buy them, life will go on as normal. However, SONY really does need to learn from these mistakes and keep trying their damndest to make sure it dosent happen again.
Do I think SONY is to blame for this whole debacle? Yes and no. I believe they should be held responsible for having the info not as protected as it should have been and there rather piss poor handling of the situation, but we also musnt forget that they were hacked, so we need to blame the hackers too. Which goes without saying. In reality though, no online syestem is really safe, but companys still need to be held with the responsiblity of doing their best to keep it safe.
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