Almost 100 Million people may be regretting all their hours of online gaming

In the worst  outage suffered by the Sony Playstation 3 Network since 2006, Sony has had to shut down its Playstation Network and Qriocity music service since the evening of April 20th, after revealing an “external intrusion” that was malicious.

The shutdown affects some 77 Million gamers who have way too much time on  their hands and play war and fantasy role playing games with other players from all over the world.  The United States has some 36 Million PS3 gamers online, with Europe in at 32 Million and Asia comprising 9 Million of the total, mainly in earthquake stricken Japan where Sony is Headquartered.

At first it seemed a security breach that just caused the network to shut down.  But now the heads of Sony fear the possibility that credit card information belonging to its 77 Million users may in fact be stolen.  From what is reported, it is still too early to tell, but it is definitely something the company has not ruled out.

The organization known as “Anonymous” which has targeted Hustler Magazine, Gene Simmons and of course the Church of Scientology, was originally thought to be the culprit behind the attack, but has denied any involvement in the incident.

The breach could possibly cost the company Billions of dollars.  The attack also comes at a bad time for Sony as it just released “SOCOM 4” which is one of Sony’s biggest online game franchises.  The outage is also giving an edge to Microsoft’s XBox gaming platform.  Microsoft requires a $60 a year membership for their network, but Sony’s is free of charge.  While that may help Sony with having problems of refunding membership costs, it will have little consolation to those who use their PS3’s to access services such as Netflix, Vudu or Blockbuster Online.

Sony said the 3-digit security code information located on the back of customer credit cards has not been stolen, hopefully making it difficult for fraud criminals to use customer credit lines.

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