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PlayStation Network is back online in North America following a daylong siege by hackers who even communicated a bomb threat to an airline in order to divert a flight carrying a top Sony executive.
PSN and Sony Entertainment Network returned to service about 3 a.m. ET. A statement on the PlayStation Blog said the system was taken offline because of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. "We have seen no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorized access to users' personal information," the statement said.
Because of the outage, the regular maintenance scheduled for PSN in North America has been postponed. It was to have lasted from about 12 to 7:30 p.m. ET.
The outage began sometime in the early morning Sunday; a hacker group claimed responsibility in its Twitter feed, and earlier it said it had attacked servers for Blizzard Entertainment, League of Legends and Path of Exile.
After PSN was taken offline, the hackers apparently turned their attention to Xbox Live. Currently, Xbox Live is reporting trouble with party chat and server unavailability issues in Diablo 3 on both Xbox One and Xbox 360, but that core services are up and running. Diablo 3 is a Blizzard game.
As this was happening, American Airlines Flight 362 from Dallas to San Diego was diverted to Phoenix after the same hackers tweeted to American a threat that the airplane carrying explosives. John Smedley, the president of Sony Online Entertainment, was aboard the flight along with 178 others and six crewmembers.
"Yes. My plane was diverted," he tweeted later. "Not going to discuss more than that. Justice will find these guys." A Sony Online Entertainment representative later told ShackNews that the FBI was investigating but gave no other comment, saying the incident was now an issue of national security.
