Sony PlayStation’s cloud computing network experienced significant downtime starting on April 21. The outage affected Sony’s PlayStation Network and its Qriocity music service. Sony PlayStation’s cloud based environment allows users to download and use online games, music, videos and movies. Patrick Seybold, Sony’s Senior Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media, announced that an “external intrusion” was responsible for the attack, generating suspicions that hackers were responsible for bringing down Sony’s cloud based gaming and music platform. The hacker group Anonymous was the principal suspect for the Sony outage after Sony initiated a lawsuit against George Hotz, a PlayStation user with the username GeoHot that jailbroke his PlayStation 3 and distributed jailbreaking tools to other users to download unauthorized applications. In early March, a Northern California court awarded Sony access to Hotz’s social media accounts, his PayPal account and the IP addresses of users who visited George Hotz’s website. The hacker collective Anonymous objected to Sony’s lawsuit against George Hotz, noting, “You have abused the judicial system in an attempt to censor information on how your products work. You have victimized your own customers merely for possessing and sharing information, and continue to target every person who seeks this information. In doing so, you have violated the privacy of thousands.” After Anonymous issued threats to Sony about their handling of the Hotz lawsuit, Sony experienced downtime on its main website, Style.com and the U.S. PlayStation site on April 6, in attacks that have been widely attributed to Anonymous.
But Anonymous denied responsibility for the recent outage by claiming, “For Once, We Didn’t Do It,” and that “While it could be the case that other Anons have acted by themselves, AnonOps was not related to this incident and does not take responsibility for whatever has happened. A more likely explanation is that Sony is taking advantage of Anonymous’ previous ill-will towards the company to distract users from the fact that the outage is actually an internal problem with the company’s servers.” Sony’s technical troubles follow high profile recent releases of Mortal Kombat and Portal 2. Considered alongside Amazon’s EC2 recent outage, Sony’s downtime raises increased concerns about quality of service and reliability in the world of cloud computing. Downtime on Sony’s PlayStation Network began on April 21 and continues as of the evening of April 24, 2011.
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