A couple of days back, Sony’s PlayStation Network and Qriocity services went offline without any prior notice. Immediately speculation began to mount that “Anonymous”, an infamous band of hacktivists, had succeeded in hacking the PSN. Anonymous had earlier taken issue with Sony’s strong stance against jailbreaking of the PS3, and the treatment meted to Geohot. It had threatened to fight back against Sony. However, after initially causing intermittent outages of PSN, Anon decided to stop its attempts to knock out the PSN, in order to avoid inconveniencing users.

Now, Sony has finally broken its silence, and has confirmed that the PlayStation Network and Qriocity were taken offline due to “an external intrusion”. Anonymous has, however, distanced itself from the hacking of the PSN through its press release titled “For Once We Didn’t Do It”. The release states that, “While it is possible that other Anons have acted by themselves, AnonOps was not related to this incident and does not take responsibility for whatever has happened”.

Irrespestive of the cause of the outage, this is bad news for gamers all over the world. Sony hasn’t clarified how long the outages are likely to continue; however, there is a good chance that the services will not be restored within the next couple of days. This means that PS3 owners are going to have a long weekend.