Sony’s back up! Sort of...

Sony’s PSN services are finally being restored. The three week long hiatus is finally over. They have instituted new rules for security’s sake. But is it enough? Why is Japan still out of the loop? How much of a black eye will Sony have due to this outage?

On April 20, Sony’s PSN was hacked and taken down. A week or so later, after Sony finished reassuring its customers that everything was under control and the network would be up and running soon, Online Entertainment went down as well. After the PSN outage, Sony told the public that user information had been taken, but wasn’t clear whether credit card information had been taken as well. After SOE went out, they confirmed that possibly hundreds of thousands of non US credit card information had been grabbed.

So, now we’re three weeks later. Last weekend, Sony began restoring the network. Right now, if you’re in the US or Europe, you can use the services, but not do anything that requires a credit card. Sony says that the full service will be restored by the end of May. Yay, right?

Sony told the public that it’s done everything possible to ensure the security of the network in the future. But, you have to do your part as a user. There are new regulations in place for password creation. The passwords must be at least 8 characters long, must have at least one letter and one number, cannot have the same consecutive letter or number three times in a row, I.E. 111, and must not be a dictionary word. These steps are fabulous, and ones you should be taking any time you create a password. But one would hope that Sony has done its part as well, and made the back end far more secure than it has been up to this point.

There are those who aren’t so sure Sony has done its part. The Japanese government is not allowing the service to be restored because of ongoing security concerns. They are not sure the measures Sony has taken are effective enough against the countermeasures during the hack. It must be galling for Sony that its home country doesn’t trust it to be secure.

We’re reasonably used to cloud services going down. It’s sort of par for the course. But a three week outage is extreme. I’m not sure how much money Sony has lost, but it must be astronomical. Its share price has dropped by 9% since the beginning of this problem. And what about future opinion? It remains to be seen if people are as willing to trust the service with their info as easily as they once were. Have users found an alternative to the service during the outage that they now prefer?

What are your thoughts? If you previously used the PSN, what did you do during the outage? Did you go to another service or wait? Will you go back to PSN? Have Sony’s troubles affected your opinion of the company at all?

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