Sony’s PlayStation Network outage costs $171M

Sony said that the cost of the PlayStation Network’s almost month-long outage after being attacked by hackers will be around 14 billion yen, or $171 million.

The company announced the news as part of its financial results for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2011. The estimate is based on current information and will be incurred in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2012. The outage was one of the worst in the history of cyber attacks, and it meant that 77 million registered users couldn’t play online games or make purchases on the network.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":260671,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,games,","session":"D"}']

No doubt a big part of the cost was hiring security contractors to investigate the matter and rebuild the network so that it was safe and secure. That process started on April 20 and service wasn’t restored until around May 15. In the meantime, Sony’s brand image suffered enormously, and the company lost a lot of  goodwill among gamers.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.