Sony PlayStation network knocked offline by cyber attack

The Sony PlaysSation network was targeted by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, causing much of the service to close down temporarily over the weekend.

Although the service was restored for some users on Sunday afternoon, allowing them to access streaming video services including Netflix, the Playstation Store's outage continued with a message saying it was undergoing maintenance.

Sony said on its blog: "Like other major networks around the world, the PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network have been impacted by an attempt to overwhelm our network with artificially high traffic.

"Although this has impacted your ability to access our network and enjoy our services, no personal information has been accessed. We will continue to work towards fixing this issue and hope to have our services up and running as soon as possible."

The blog was later updated to reassure users. It said: "We have seen no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorised access to users' personal information.

DDoS attacks target websites by directing huge volumes of fake traffic to it in order to overload the servers, as was the case for PlayStation.

The news comes after a flight with Sony's online entertainment president John Smedley onboard was diverted last week because someone has issued a bomb threat. The group responsible for the scare, known as Lizard Squad, is apparently the same one that brought the Sony network down just a couple of days later.

Sony was due to be carrying out routine maintenance on its network yesterday, but the update was paused until the company had rectified the DDoS issue.