More like BS3: Sony defensive about late PSN breach notice to PS3 gamers

Written by Matt Swider on April 26, 2011

News: Videogame publisher says that hacked PSN accounts and the possibility of identity theft wasn't realized until Monday.

Sony's inexcusable six-day silence regarding PSN being down and the personal data breach of the online service is being defended by Senior Director Patrick Seybold on the PlayStation blog. There, he says that while Sony shut down the network and brought in security experts following the April 19 intrusion, "it took our experts until yesterday to understand the scope of the breach."

Please Note: "Yesterday" means Monday and the email was sent to the media on Tuesday afternoon at 1:56 PM.

That means, somehow, after Monday's realization, it took another day to craft a press release warning PSN users that their personal information could be in the hands of hackers? More to the point, why did it take six days to email users of a potential security breach, even if the company didn't know the scope of the problem. Scope or no scope, Sony took PSN offline last week; it knew there was something wrong. Their next move should have been emailing users what they know, not waiting until Tuesday to contact everyone with the information they found out the prior day.

Gaming Target received a 2266% increase in website traffic after PSN was taken down on April 20. That's undeniable proof that Sony wasn't doing its job of explaining the worst case scenario to its users just in case. Free or not, it's a Sony's responsibility to alert users if the company is being entrusted with your credit card number. Now, it seems as if that worst case scenario is unfolding and the six-day delay of information will remain the top reason that the PSN outage error costs Sony the trust of many gamers.