With PlayStation Network still down, Sony admits it was hacked

Nearly three days after Sony's Playstation Network online gaming service went offline, Sony has finally admitted that the service was compromised by hackers. As a result, the company disabled the service Wednesday evening to investigate the matter, an official statement indicated.

"An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services," spokesperson Patrick Seybold said. The service outage was done "to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward," he continued.

Seybold's comments are not the first time Sony had blamed the issue on outside forces: a post appeared on the European version of the PlayStation blog saying it was investigating the possbility, but the post was removed.

Other hints that it could have been an outside job could be sourced to hacktivist group Anonymous, which was quick on Thursday to deny any involvement in the matter. The group is said to not be happy with the company over its treatment of hacker George Hotz.

Sony is still giving no update as to the timeframe for a possible resolution of the problem. Originally it had said after the problems surfaced that it would be a matter of a "day or two," but with that time frame now passing and no clear idea of when PSN may return from Sony, it could potentially be much longer.

The outage is especially maddening to those PS3 users who may depend on the network to play online-enhanced gaming titles, such as the recent release Mortal Kombat or SOCOM 4, for example. Their anger and frustration was apparent in the original story on the outage Betanews published on Friday.

"I would like it though if they'd be a bit more forthcoming about how things are going," commenter 'ownbothsystems' posted. "It's not fair to all the online players to just leave us hanging."