Sony: PSN is down due to ‘high levels of traffic designed to disrupt connectivity’

Sony is finally starting to talk about why its PlayStation Network isn’t working.

The company took to its blog to explain that a barrage of traffic is hitting multiple gaming-related networks. Sony confirmed that PSN is part of this “designed” disruption, but it did not specify any other networks that were included in the attack. The consumer-electronics conglomerate says that it has team continually working to get the service back up and running at 100 percent.

“The video game industry has been experiencing high levels of traffic designed to disrupt connectivity and online gameplay,” Sony Computer Entertainment America consumer experience boss Catherine Jensen wrote in a blog. “Multiple networks, including PSN, have been affected over the last 48 hours. PSN engineers are working hard to restore full network access and online gameplay as quickly as possible.”

Sony’s wording that explains this is a “designed” attempt to “disrupt connectivity” lends credibility to the claims of the group of cyberattackers known as Lizard Squad. This alleged band of Internet vandals said on Christmas Day that it was responsible for taking down both PSN and Xbox Live — although it has since said it has ended its attack because Kim Dotcom, the owner of file-transfer site Mega, gave them 3,000 life-time passes.

Early this morning, Sony said on Twitter that PlayStation Network was starting to come back online for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Vita. But that didn’t last. People are now reporting difficulties signing into their PSN account. This is keeping them from playing online games as well as single-player games like Far Cry 4 and Dragon Age: Inquisition that need you to sign in to work.

Sony says that these problems are expected.

“From time to time there may be disruptions in service due to surges in traffic,” wrote Jensen. “But our engineers will be working to restore service as quickly as possible.”

Of course, this is a lot of people’s first experience with PlayStation Network on PlayStation 4. On Thursday, many gamers unwrapped their brand new consoles, but they have had no chance to play many of the games they own. Sony realizes this is making a very poor first impression. The company is warning people that it will figure this out, and you shouldn’t try to return your PS4 for this reason.

“If you received a PlayStation console over the holidays and have been unable to log onto the network, know that this problem is temporary and is not caused by your game console,” wrote Jensen. “We’ll update this post once the problems subside.”