If Saturday was your day to kick back, relax and play some games on PSN, you quickly came to the realization that the PlayStation Network was down. Our site was the first of all the outlets to break the news, due to a simple coincidence which had me navigating the PlayStation Store and downloading a few games. Upon attempting to download LittleBigPlanet 2, I was quickly booted from the store and my subsequent attempts at accessing the store did little to change my faith. Taking to Twitter, I soon realized the incident was worldwide and not limited to North America.

Further discovery led to the realization that those who were logged into PSN could continue to view their friends list and download content in their queues while those logged out could not log back in, which affected both PS3 and PS Vita users. Despite partial access to the network, online gameplay was also down alongside other Sony services like Music and Video Unlimited though 3rd party services like Hulu and Netflix experienced no down time.

In the end, after 4-6 hour downtime, PSN was fully restored, though everyone was left in the dark as to why the service went down in the first place. During the down time, most users quickly feared the worse; another PlayStation Network hacking. While that might be jumping to a hasty conclusion, it’s also not a stretch and only Sony is to blame for their lack of communication during the downtime. After the jump, a chronicle of the events and Sony’s lack of communication.

On Saturday at 10:07 am (PST), I made my first tweet about the PlayStation Store being down which came roughly 10 minutes after PSN had gone down. During this time, I attempted to contact Sony via email and Twitter and heard nothing back.

10:25 am – We publish our story about PlayStation Store being down.

10:51 am – We tweet PlayStation about the PSN downtime while throughout this time, talking to other fans who are experiencing the same issue.

11:04 am – We update our original story, now realizing that it’s not just the PlayStation Store that is down.

11:56 am – We email PlayStation PR about the incident. We of course never hear from them.

12:29 pm – Sony finally confirms the issue:

We are aware that some of you are having issues accessing PSN, and we’re working to restore service to all. Thank you for your patience.

2:51 pm – Sony confirms PSN is up and running:

PSN service has now been fully restored. We do thank you for your patience – now enjoy the rest of your weekend!

3:06 pm – We update our story again, indicating PSN is back online.

Those who want to look at our Twitter feed versus the PlayStation Twitter feed will easily see that we continued to respond and interact with fans and answer their questions to the best of our ability. On the other hand, Sony never once indicated why the service was down via their Twitter feed or the PlayStation Blog. In fact, Sony has still yet to address the downtime on the PlayStation Blog, once again leaving players in the dark.

Personally, I have no fears of another hacking and believe that either something went weary in the servers or a last minute maintenance was required, after the heaving network usage from E3, due to Sony streaming the event to PlayStation Home, updating the PlayStation Store daily during E3, and giving a host of new games away for free to PlayStation Plus members.

Still, it’s not hard to think the worst, seeing how, just over a year ago, Sony had to taken down the network, due to hackers while offering little feedback during the initial first few days. While Sony’s security might have been considerably beefed up since the original incident, it seems as if communication from them to their users, let alone the press still remains troubled.

Discuss:

Did Sony handle the recent PlayStation Network downtime appropriately?