The Play Station Network's Epic Fail

You know, the last time I played a Play Station was on the original console back in my university days in the mid 1990’s. I think we hired some skiing / trick jump game. I recall being bored but that might have been because my flat mate hogged the controller all weekend. 

Any ways, I’m very pro X-Box some it’s with some gloating that I note that the Play Station Network has crashed due to some ‘external intrusion’ and no one has been able to do anything online or multiplayer related for the past 6 days.

Six days without online activity to allow people to play recently released games like Portal 2 with online friends or to download DLC for high flying games like Mass Effect 2 is like having a keg party without a keg, no body gets drunk or laid. It’s like wandering round in the desert for 40 years, suddenly finding yourself at the right address but the door is locked and theirs no body home.

You get my point.  This crash is an EPIC fail by Sony to protect one of their core business systems. Sure, it appears to have been an outside attack but surely there were systems in place to recognise it was happening and taking counter measures? I can imagine a pretty stressed Sony exec mimicking the Arbiter’s best line from Halo 3, ‘were it so easy’ in response but sure that’s it right?

The PlayStation outage affects around 70 million registered PlayStation 3 and PSP users – that’s a lot of pissed off gamers. When the network gets its reboot what will Sony do to placate it’s users. Will it offer free credits or will it give everyone a free ‘I Survived the Outage’ Trophy? 

Either way Sony is sure going to have to do a lot to restore its reputation. Even though the core service is free to gamers, people buy games from Sony in the knowledge they can use and rely on the online service, so they’d still have a legitimate gripe and would probably expect something awesome as a 'sorry'. 

You can bet your all your Halo achievement points that the engineers of Xbox Live are taking a good long look at what happened and are doing their best to ensure it does not happen to their system – and for that, Xbox fans can be pleased that this catastrophe happened to Sony rather than Microsoft – heck I think we’re still getting over the red ring of death fiasco. 

What are your thoughts? What do you think Sony should do to make it up to it's 70 million users?