The PSN is out of action once again, with the Sony tech team working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Usually, when Sony have had scheduled maintenance to do, they have been quite specific with communicating the downtime. This is not a scheduled session though which means there’s no clear time-frame as to when we can expect to get back online. Worryingly, this is affecting the servers worldwide.

So what problems will this cause you? You can’t sign-in to the PSN (you’ll be greeted with the error code: 80710A06), so you can’t get access to the PSN Store or the Qriocity service. More importantly, you can’t play any games online, particularly annoying if you’re in the middle of reviewing SOCOM: Special Forces. If you have any pending downloads they will at least carry on downloading, handy if you’re trying to download that 870MB Battlefield 3 video.

Speculation on the net and forums has naturally brought up the name of the infamous hacker group, Anonymous, who have been promising an attack for a while. We’ll assume George Hotz has nothing to do with it (apart from stirring up a shit-storm in the first place) as he and Sony recently agreed to play nice. Well, on other sides of the playground at least.

It’s getting ridiculous now to be honest, all this because of Sony trying to protect their machine by removing the Linux-style options. Don’t like it? Go buy a PC and piss around with that so console gamers can get back to playing games on a machine they’ve paid good money for.

We’ll keep you updated on the situation right here. Or you can check the EU forum thread or their Twitter page.

UPDATE: This just in from the EU PlayStation Blog:

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.

Interestingly a different post originally appeared and was then removed and replaced with the above statement. The original one said:

As you are no doubt aware, the current emergency outage is continuing this afternoon and all Sony Online Network services remain unavailable. Our support teams are investigating the cause of the problem, including the possibility of targeted behaviour by an outside party. If the reported Network problems are indeed caused by such acts, we would like to once again thank our customers who have borne the brunt of the attack through interrupted service.

The main difference between the two statements is the intial admittance that the problems may be “targeted behaviour by an outside party.” Let’s wait and see what happens next then. No SOCOM online yet that’s for sure. [PlayStation Blog]