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Anonymous: PSN outage not our doing

Hacker group denies responsibility for Sony's online service going offline, says it's just a convenient scapegoat for electronics giant.

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After going down Wednesday night, Sony's PlayStation Network is still down as of Friday afternoon. And ever since a Thursday morning notice that it may be a day or two before service is restored, Sony has been silent on the matter.

At the moment, it only does offline.
At the moment, it only does offline.

One group that isn't staying quiet is Anonymous. In protest of Sony's litigious treatment of PlayStation 3 hackers, the decentralized group temporarily brought down the PSN earlier this month with distributed denial of service attacks. However, today a press release posted on the loose-knit organization's news site insists it has nothing to do with Sony's current woes.

In a release titled, "For Once We Didn't Do It," the group acknowledges members of Anonymous could be acting independently, but insists its organizational structure "was not related to this incident and does not take responsibility for whatever has happened." It goes on to suggest that Sony is merely using its recent struggles with the group "to distract users from the fact that the outage is actually an internal problem with the company's servers."

The note specifically points to an entry posted to and then pulled from the official European PlayStation Blog that implied the PSN could be down due to "targeted behavior by an outside party." The Anonymous attack from earlier this month not only impacted the PSN, but also brought down PlayStation.com and the official PlayStation blog for stretches of time.

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