PSN restoration delayed

Sony has dashed the hopes of PlayStation 3 owners who had hoped to play online over the weekend. In a post on the official PlayStation Blog, Sony Computer Entertainment America's senior director of corporate communications and social media Patrick Seybold announced that restoring PlayStation Network service is taking longer than expected.

"As you may know, we've begun the process of restoring the service through internal testing of the new system," he said. "We're still working to confirm the security of the network infrastructure, as well as working with a variety of outside entities to confirm with them of the security of the system. Verifying the system security is vital for the process of restoration. Additional comprehensive system checks and testing are still required, and we must complete that process before bringing the systems online."

Seybold continued, "As you've heard us say, our utmost priorities are the security of the network and ensuring your data is safe. We won't restore the services until we can test the system's strength in these respects…When we held the press conference in Japan last week, based on what we knew, we expected to have the services online within a week. We were unaware of the extent of the attack on Sony Online Entertainment servers, and we are taking this opportunity to conduct further testing of the incredibly complex system…We apologize for the delay and inconvenience of this network outage."

Seybold's comments came the day after Sony announced it was performing "final testing" before the system went back online. That same day, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer offered an apology for the prolonged delay, and the company unveiled a free identity-theft protection program with $1 million worth of insurance for each customer.

Unfortunately, today's announcement comes over two weeks after the PSN first went offline on the evening of April 20. The following Tuesday, the company confirmed there had been a data breach, but said some PSN services would be up within a week. Then on April 30, the company announced it would give PSN users free content to make up for the outage and promised the network would be back online within the following week. Finally, this past Wednesday, the company submitted a detailed timeline of the attack to the US Congress--the day before a cyber-security expert claimed Sony knew the PSN's security software was outdated.