14 DAY TRIAL // UPDATE #3: Sony has just announced that the PlayStation Network will be back online this week, between May 2 and May 6, and that a special Welcome Back program will see users get free advantages like PlayStation Plus memberships.
UPDATE #2: Sony has officially admitted that the PSN has been hacked and that personal user data, from PSN IDs or passwords to even credit card data has been compromised.
UPDATE: Sony still doesn't know when the PlayStation Network will be back online, despite being the outage lasting for almost six days. Check out the new details about the PSN outage here.
Original Story: Sony has just admitted that its PlayStation Network online service is currently down, and that the problems it is experiencing might not be fixed for "another day or two."
Sony has had quite a few problems with its PlayStation Network service in recent weeks, but only right now, when both Portal 2 and SOCOM 4 were released, both heavily relying on online connectivity, did the service go down completely.
Both North American and European PSN users are currently met with error messages when they try to log into their accounts.
Sony posted an official announcement on the European PlayStation Blog yesterday, saying that the service was "down for maintenance."
The America PlayStation Blog, however, was host to a more formal statement from Patrick Seybold, Sony Computer Entertainment America's senior director of corporate communications, who said that the company is trying to fix the problems as fast as possible, but that the outage might continue for at least a day or two.
"While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running," Seybold said. "Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this matter. Please stay tuned to this space for more details, and we’ll update you again as soon as we can."
Sony, including its PlayStation Network, were under attack by hacker activist group Anonymous earlier this month, which resulted in websites of the company going down, while the PSN experienced short offline periods.
The group stopped its efforts after a few days, however, saying that it will no longer attack the PSN, because that affects the actual PlayStation 3 owners who want to play online, rather than Sony.
Since then, the service was running smoothly, up until earlier this week, when the error messages started to appear.