The world’s tech press, fickle bunch that they are, have moved on from bashing Sony over the continued outage of the company’s Playstation Network and Qriocity services, and are currently drooling over Google’s latest and greatest at the I/O 2011 conference in San Francisco.
When the best thing that happens to Sony is that their problems are no longer newsworthy, you know they’re in trouble.
The electronics giant took their online service down on 20th April after determining the system had been hacked and sensitive data extracted. Since then an ongoing PR effort has attempted to deflect the tidal wave of bad press heading in Sony’s direction. Subsequent to the initial announcement, Sony announced their Sony Online Entertainment division had also been breached, taking the total haul of personal information to over 100 million individuals.
Sony has been managing the crisis from their Playstation Blog, where a number of updates, press releases and promises of rewards once services have been restored  have been posted. Sony had initially promised to have their services back online last week, but missed the deadline. In a terse, three-sentence update yesterday Sony rep Patrick Seybold admitted they still do not have a firm timeline in place for restoration –
“I know you all want to know exactly when the services will be restored. At this time, I can’t give you an exact date, as it will likely be at least a few more days.”
It would seem even the Sony faithful who comment on the Playstation Blog have had enough, one of them noting “Xbox is starting to look better and better.”
Today marks three weeks since Sony’s services went dark – before long it will be a full month. At the very least, Sony must be thanking Google for taking the limelight.
