Sony’s PlayStation Network Goes Down

For the better part of the day, PlayStation 3 owners have been unable to take their consoles online via Sony’s PlayStation Network, a seemingly unplanned network outage that the company says it’s “working hard on restoring”.

PlayStation Network service appears to have been interrupted early on Wednesday morning, with functionality still not restored. The company said via its official PlayStation Twitter account, “We’re aware that some of you are having issues trying to log into PSN. We’re working to resolve the issue, and we’ll update you here.”

The company’s European arm has offered more frequent, but still vague, updates on the downtime. “PlayStation Network engineers are working hard on restoring the service,” Sony said through its PlayStation EU blog. “However, we have no news on when it will be back online.”

An alert posted to the PlayStation Community site reads, “The PlayStation Network is down temporarily. This is unscheduled maintenance and we are unsure how long it will be down. Don’t worry, SONY is aware of this and the engineers are all over it.”

Kotaku contacted Sony Computer Entertainment America reps for comment and clarification on the unscheduled downtime, but has not heard back yet.

PlayStation Network services was severely interrupted in mid-April, after an “external intrusion” compromised the network’s security and exposed users’ personal information. That extended downtime lasted until May 14, when Sony restored some of PSN’s services. Hopefully, today’s situation is far less severe and will be remedied soon.