Sony promises PlayStation Store by end of month
Looks like the PlayStation Store is coming back online in the next few days, even though it wasn't up on Tuesday, as some prior indications suggested it might be.
Sony took part of its PlayStation Network offline for a time on Tuesday to perform scheduled maintenance, noting its plans on its official PlayStation blog. The company took the opportunity to explain that the maintenance wouldn't bring the PlayStation Store back up at the same time.
The confusion stemmed from a confidential Sony memo leaked last week in which Tuesday, May 24, 2011 was mentioned as the possible restart date for PlayStation Store services. The store has been offline since April, when Sony turned off access to its PlayStation Network and other services following a hacker break-in that exposed personal information on tens of millions of user accounts.
Sony later downplayed the memo, saying that it wasn't May 24th wasn't a hard start date. The memo had been sent to Sony publishing partners and PlayStation 3 developers whose software has been unavailable for purchase since the PlayStation Store went offline in April.
The scheduled maintenance to PSN on Tuesday took registration and account management capabilities offline, according to Sony, with "the majority of consumers" still able to play online and sign in to Web sites that use PSN authentication.
But a trailing comment at the end of the blog post gave gamers looking for answers on the PlayStation Store reboot the information they'd been waiting for:
"For those asking about the PlayStation Store, we’re still targeting restoration of all services by the end of this month. Contrary to reports, the Store will not be publishing today," noted Jeff Rubenstein, Sony social media manager, in the blog post.
By 8:30 PM Eastern Time, Sony noted that the scheduled PSN maintenance was done through its official Twitter presence.
More:
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- Sony relaunches PlayStation Network
- Protracted PlayStation Network outage causes gamers to cash in PS3s, games
- Sony delays PlayStation Network restart, citing SOE break-in
- Security expert testifies Sony servers went unpatched