Sr. Director, Corporate Communications & Social Media Patrick Seybold offered some clarification on the PSN intrusion and outage yesterday via the official PlayStation Blog.
There’s a difference in timing between when we identified there was an intrusion and when we learned of consumers’ data being compromised. We learned there was an intrusion April 19th and subsequently shut the services down. We then brought in outside experts to help us learn how the intrusion occurred and to conduct an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the incident. It was necessary to conduct several days of forensic analysis, and it took our experts until yesterday to understand the scope of the breach. We then shared that information with our consumers and announced it publicly this afternoon.
Sony has even went as far as to provide a FAQ related to the attack (you can
view it here). Included in the FAQ are such questions as "Why was Sony not prepared for a compromise of its network?" and "Why is it taking so long to restore network services?".
What many users want to know is, "When will PSN be back online?". Here's the answer, straight from the horse's mouth (so to speak):
We have a clear path to have PlayStation Network and Qriocity systems back online, and expect to restore some services within a week.
We will keep the service down to allow us to conduct a thorough investigation to ensure smooth operation of our network services when they return; we are working hard to resume the services as soon as we can be reasonably assured our security concerns have been addressed.
According to other reports circulating the web, Sony has apparently promised to make ammends to MMO players via special events planned for
DC Universe Online and
Free Realms. The events are apparently planned to kick off April 30th, assuming PSN is back online.
Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan, estimates that annual revenue for Sony from PSN sales of downloadable games, movies, music etc. is in the $500 million range. Sony will likely lose approximately $20 million in revenue and $6 million in profit, based upon Pachter's revenue estimate. This is assuming that the outage run into a second week, which is likely based on the recent information from Sony.