In a letter posted yesterday on their official blog, Howard Stringer, Sony's CEO, shared a few things about the PSN outage, including the free identity theft protection they're offering all PSN subscribers as part of their "Welcome Back" program:
To date, there is no confirmed evidence any credit card or personal information has been misused, and we continue to monitor the situation closely. We are also moving ahead with plans to help protect our customers from identity theft around the world. A program for U.S. PlayStation Network and Qriocity customers that includes a $1 million identity theft insurance policy per user was launched earlier today and announcements for other regions will be coming soon.
There's a bit more to the post, but most of the information contained within the letter we've read previously, but it's available
here for those that are interested.
The key for most users is the fact that there hasn't been any official announcement as far as when to expect the network to be brought back online. The recent information available via the official blog leaves it vague at best, stating in the update from yesterday:
In the coming days, we will restore service to the networks and welcome you back to the fun. I wanted to personally reach out and let you know that we are committed to serving you to the very best of our ability, protecting your information better than ever, and getting you back to what you signed up for – all the games and great entertainment experiences that you expect from Sony.
We reported last week on
PS3 Owners Switching To Xbox. Because the scale of the original poll wasn't very large, we decided to create our own poll and see what PS3 owners had to say about switching to Xbox 360. We've had over 12,500 users participate in our ongoing poll, and the results are somewhat dissapointing for Sony. Almost 40% of Playstation 3 owners have either switched to Xbox 360, or are thinking about it.
As of the time of this writing, the numbers are as follows:
• 14.3% (1,795 votes) have already switched
• 24.5% (3,070 votes) are thinking about switching
• 61.1% (7,653 votes) don't plan on switching consoles
If you haven't done so already, you can participate in the
PSN Outage Poll - Switching To Xbox? below.