PlayStation Network still down, Anonymous claims no involvement

As the outage of Sony's PlayStation Network entered into a third day without any end in sight -- and some reports indicate a cyberattack may be at fault -- at least one group is making sure that it is not blamed for the problem: Anonymous.

The group said that the mishap was due to internal issues with Sony's own servers, and those fingering Anonymous were "taking advantage of Anonymous' previous ill-will towards the company." A message to the company's PlayStation blog in Europe had said that Sony was investigating "the possibility of targeted behavior by an outside party," but since had been removed.

"Sony is incompetent... While it could be the case that other Anons have acted by themselves AnonOps was not related to this incident and takes no responsibility for it," Anonymous wrote in a public statement.

Sony has provided little information on what may have caused the outage other than acknowledging issues beginning on Wednesday evening, and saying in a status update on Thursday that the issue could extend through the weekend. Either way, the complication cripples the gaming console for many.

Console applications like Netflix, MLB.tv, and others require a PSN login in order to function, and now are inoperable. This week also saw several highly anticipated games, with online play, released -- Mortal Kombat and SOCOM 4 to name two -- and the latter heavily leans on the PSN and online gameplay.

Obviously, PS3 owners are not happy, criticizing the company's silence on the cause, and slowness in getting it fixed. "SONY needs better engineers to secure the PSN," user 'Moeeed' wrote in the most recent blog post.

"Do you see now why online-only games are a really bad idea?" wrote another commenter 'SkyNet003.' "Offline single-player will never die, specially with things like this."