[Update] Rejoice, PlayStation faithful! The PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network are back online, Sony has confirmed. You can now get back to downloading games and playing online with your friends.
In addition, it looks like today's scheduled maintenance for the network has been postponed to a later date. Sony plans to provide additional information on the forthcoming maintenance soon, so please stay tuned.
[Original] Sony's PlayStation Network has been the target of many different hacking attempts over the past few years, with a major incident resulting in the loss of consumer information and making headlines though today's breach comes from a group identifying themselves on Twitter who have reportedly taken responsibility.
Anyone looking to go online with their PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, or PlayStation Vita gaming devices will find that PSN responds with an error message both in the PlayStation Network store and in general connectivity or multiplayer.
Sony updated users via PlayStation Blog entry with the following:
Like other major networks around the world, the PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network have been impacted by an attempt to overwhelm our network with artificially high traffic.
Although this has impacted your ability to access our network and enjoy our services, no personal information has been accessed.
We will continue to work towards fixing this issue and hope to have our services up and running as soon as possible.
We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.
We'll update you with more soon. Thanks to tipster, elmoreoocyte.