There’s been some­thing miss­ing from all of our lives lately – some­thing very impor­tant to many of us, the PlaySta­tion Net­work. The weeks with­out Black Ops is begin­ning to feel like a life­time, but there may be an end in sight. Bloomberg News is report­ing that Sony will restart PSN on May 31, a full 6 weeks after the ini­tial shutdown.

This isn’t the first time a return date has been promised. Last week, Sony gave gamers hope with a planned return date of Fri­day, May 5^th, but Fri­day came and went, and Sony exec­u­tive Patrick Sey­bold offi­cially announced another delay on the Playsta­tion blog later that day.

Much like a per­sonal com­puter with­out inter­net, a Sony Playsta­tion 3 is vir­tu­ally use­less to many mul­ti­player gam­ing enthu­si­asts with­out access to the PlaySta­tion Net­work. The net­work is so mas­sive and sophis­ti­cated that it con­sists of an esti­mated 130 servers and spans over 77 mil­lion reg­is­tered users. The sheer num­bers alone are astonishing.

As I’m sure all read­ers here know, the PlaySta­tion Net­work is a mul­ti­player sup­port sys­tem, that enables peo­ple of all ages to release their frus­tra­tion on a great many other gamers. Be it wield­ing an RPK to kill some zom­bies in Black Ops or rac­ing a Fer­rari, the PlaySta­tion Net­work has turned into a way of con­nect­ing peo­ple on oppo­site ends of the uni­verse together, to spar in games of bat­tle, chance and dress-up.

For the nos­tal­gic crowd, the Net­work even offers a wide array of PlaySta­tion and PSP titles on the cheap. Sim­ply put, Sony’s Net­work has some­thing for everyone.

As such, it comes as no sur­prise that Sony’s PlaySta­tion Net­work has a spe­cial spot in the hearts and minds of many. To our great dis­may, the PlaySta­tion Net­work col­lapsed on April 20, 2011, thereby hin­der­ing our chances of engag­ing in mul­ti­player game­play. The PlaySta­tion Network’s tem­po­rary demise has even pre­vented PlaySta­tion 3 own­ers from access­ing their favorite video stream­ing net­works. To say that ser­vices such as Hulu, Netl­fix and Vudu feel the crunch of the net­work out­age goes with­out say­ing. Hulu has even issued a $2 credit to its Hulu Plus sub­scribers in order to com­pen­sate for the delay.

How The Net­work Went Down?

Although the Net­work out­age began on April 20, 2011, Sony pro­vided the world with a state­ment on April 26, 2011. Accord­ing to those reports, hack­ers have ille­gally and unscrupu­lously obtained user data. Sony claims the data includes the con­tact infor­ma­tion of many of its users includ­ing their names, home addresses, email infor­ma­tion, birth­days, as well as their PlaySta­tion Net­work login infor­ma­tion. In tra­di­tional Amer­i­can legalese, the Japan­ese multi­na­tional con­glom­er­ate issued pre­cau­tion­ary instruc­tions to its users on obtain­ing credit reports, fraud alerts and the like. Sony has admit­ted that approx­i­mately 10 mil­lion credit card num­bers may have been obtained by the hackers.

Sony’s Game Plan

At this point, Sony has pro­vided us with a heart­felt apol­ogy and a promise to strengthen its network’s infra­struc­ture by per­form­ing a “phased restora­tion”. In typ­i­cal hard­core rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment, the com­pany vowed to plug any secu­rity holes and strong­hold its Net­work against future attacks.

Accord­ing to the PlaySta­tion Blog, Sony is offer­ing a com­pli­men­tary 30 days of mem­ber­ship, as well as a promise for free con­tent down­loads in the near future.

Reports have sug­gested that Hacker orga­ni­za­tion Anony­mous is respon­si­ble for the out­age. Nev­er­the­less, the group itself has released state­ments indi­cat­ing otherwise.

Accord­ing to a recent Sony press release, Sony offi­cials were unaware of the breadth of the attack on the Net­work, and there­fore, were inac­cu­rate in their pro­jec­tions as to when the ser­vice would be rein­stated. We hope that this time they’ve got it fig­ured out.

Time will tell whether the Sony PlaySta­tion Net­work ser­vice will be restored by May 31^st. As of yet, there is no telling exactly how many of the Network’s sub­scribers finan­cial infor­ma­tion was actu­ally stolen, or what the long term fall­out will be.

We anx­iously await fur­ther devel­op­ments from Sony. The future suc­cess of Call of Duty and other mul­ti­player games hinges on the network’s abil­ity to return promptly and safely.