Sony’s PlayStation Network suffers big outage

The good news is that Sony has more than 70 million registered users for its PlayStation Network online service for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable. The bad news is that they’re all angry because Sony suffered an outage today.

Sony is still investigating what’s wrong, but it predicted the service would likely take a day or two to bring back up. The outage comes on the same day that Amazon’s cloud-based web services business went down, taking lots of Web 2.0 businesses down too. It shows another hazard of operating cloud-based services.

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The PlayStation Network, or PSN, is Sony’s attempt to engage its video-game console and PlayStation Portable audience in a larger online entertainment network that includes online games, movies and TV shows, as well as Sony exclusives such as Qore, a digital magazine, and The Tester original TV show. It’s a strategic asset for the console maker as more of the-video game audience moves into the online world.

On its blog, Sony said, “While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running. Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this matter. Please stay tuned to this space for more details, and we’ll update you again as soon as we can.”

There are 948 games now available in the PlayStation Network store, as well as 4,000 pieces of add-on content for games. There are also 31,000 movies and TV shows available for download, not counting the content available on Netflix, Hulu, and sports content.

Just yesterday, Sony announced that it would launch its PlayStation Home service update for users who visit its gamer’s virtual world on the PlayStation Network. It’s not clear if that update was the cause of the crash.