Sony officials continue to work around the clock to bring the downed Playstation Network back online after an "external intrusion" forced the company to take the system down.
A Saturday night update said that the company is rebuilding their system to "further strengthen our network infrastructure", further delaying the return of PSN and ability of PS3 gamers to play online.
"We sincerely regret that PlayStation Network and Qriocity services have been suspended, and we are working around the clock to bring them both back online," SCEA's Patrick Seybold wrote in the update. "Our efforts to resolve this matter involve re-building our system to further strengthen our network infrastructure. Though this task is time-consuming, we decided it was worth the time necessary to provide the system with additional security.
"We thank you for your patience to date and ask for a little more while we move towards completion of this project. We will continue to give you updates as they become available."
On Friday, Sony placed the blame on the continued outage of the Playstation Network on an "external intrusion" in their system.
That intrusion led the company, Seybold said, to take the service down to conduct a thorough investigation.
The latest update comes after days of intermittent service and a complete outage starting Wednesday of the Playstation Network.
A visit to the Playstation Network website or attempt to sign on lands you a "server maintenance" message, though the official Playstation blog's latest update says they're not quite sure what the cause of the downtime is.
There remains no estimate for when the service will be back online, but an update earlier this week from Seybold said it could be "a full day or two."
Seybold's Friday night missive on the official Playstation Blog backs what the official European Playstation Blog original said, claiming "targeted behaviour by an outside party."
What outside party could possibly want to make online gaming impossible on a PS3?
The most likely culprits are activist group "Anonymous". The hacktivists were claiming to be behind the original attacks against the PlayStation Network for a few weeks now, but then the group called off their attacks . However, the nature of this particular hacking beast means that some splinter cell could still be behind this latest outage. A variety of videos and posts have popped up on the Internet by people claiming to represent Anonymous, both decrying and claiming credit for the attacks on the Playstation Network and the outage.
This isn't the first time Playstation 3 owners were knocked offline. Last March a clock glitch knocked Playstation 3's worldwide offline and, in some cases, unable to play games even offline.
Stay tuned to this page for updates as they happen. We've reached out to Sony for comment on whether they suspect this is the work of some sort of attack or a technical issue on their end. They've not responded to any of our emailed questions.
Update On PlayStation Network/Qriocity Services [Playstation Blog]
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