Sony has been in a long, arduous battle against hackers since the beginning of this year when they took notorious hacker GeoHot to court for "circumventing" certain security measures on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Network. The move ticked off the entire hacker community, including hacker group Anonymous.
Tensions hit an all-time high when Anonymous brought down a number of Sony's sites and started targeting Sony employees. The tactics seemed to work, as Sony reached a settlement with GeoHot in the case. Everything seemed to be coming to an end, and finally, Sony and PlayStation Network users could get back to normal…
However, issues with the PlayStation Network, the PS3's equivalent to Xbox LIVE service, still remain, and may even be getting worse by the day. Over the past week, the PSN has been down intermittently and has been completely inaccessible for the past few hours. The problems are bad enough for Sony to address them publicly today, thanking PSN users for their patience:
As you are no doubt aware, the current emergency outage is continuing this afternoon and all Sony Online Network services remain unavailable. 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. Our engineers are continuing to work to restore and maintain the services, and we appreciate our customers’ continued support.
This is no doubt doing a number on Sony's image in the eyes of loyal consumers, who are likely beginning to get fed up due to the near-constant service outages as of late. How about you? Are you suffering from these persistent issues?
