In fourth day of outage, Sony says it is beefing up PlayStation Network security

Sony is working to improve the security of its PlayStation Network and its Qriocity music service as it works to rebuild the system and bring it back online. The service went down late Wednesday night due to an “external intrusion” and has been down ever since.

Sony hasn’t offered a detailed explanation of the cause of the outage for the PSN, which has more than 70 million registered users on the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Portable game systems. People use it for everything from online games to the PlayStation Home virtual world to watching movies and videos. The outage is one of the worst suffered by a major online network, and it is happening at the same time that Amazon’s Elastic Cloud 2 service also crashed.

Anonymous, a group of hackers that attacked Sony sites earlier because of its prosecution of a PS 3 jailbreaking hacker, accused Sony of being incompetent but said it was not responsible for the attack. The group has also sent a video message making fun of Sony.

Patrick Seybold, a spokesman for Sony, said on the PlayStation blog, “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. 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.”