Evoking memories of the 2011 debacle, PSN went offline worldwide but thankfully, this attack on the service wasn’t as dangerous as the one a few years ago. The network is back online now, and will be undergoing maintenance soon in order to fix some issues. It had gone down owing to an orchestrated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that apparently took place in the wee hours of Sunday, August 24.
Such occurrences are usually caused by the flooding of the targeted network with data, to the tune that new connections cannot be made by legitimate users. Sony has acknowledged the attack and has revealed through a blog post that no personal information has been compromised. Other online services affected by this include those of Path of Exile, World of Warcraft and League of Legends, but even they appear to have recovered now. After PSN was back online, the company announced that a scheduled maintenance will be taking place later today.
Back in 2011, PSN was hit by a deadly external intrusion which caused the personal details of around 77 million people to be stolen. This prevented owners of the PS3 and the PSP from logging into their accounts and playing online for more than twenty days. It was one of the largest data security breaches in history, and become a major issue worldwide due to theft claims. Although, this DDoS attack is nothing compared to the 2011 outage of the PlayStation Network, it has indeed brought to the mind memories of the said attack.
Like we said, a scheduled PSN maintenance has been slated to take place later today, but Sony is still to reveal the exact time for it.