I'ts been one of those weeks for the on-demand / SaaS / social networking weeks. The biggest problem most have been dealing with has been Amazon's web-hosting-storage-database-cloud service Amazon Web Services, which took a massive tumble in it's US East data center. Needless to say, many large web sites and online services have been effected when the problems rippled throughout their system, bringing sites such as Reddit and much-used services such as Assembla to their knees. Amazon have been nothing but candid on what is going on with the EC2 and EBS problems they have had however, which marks a clear difference in tactics between the Bookseller-come-hosting-provder and Sony.
Sony turned off their Playstation Network on Wednesday. For those who don't know, the PSN is a free service that allows the online-multiplayer elements of the games, as well as additional content, but also such services as chat, video-on-demand, audio streaming and LoveFilm to work. There are also many elements in single-player games that require you to be logged into the PSN, and some games require registering the game on PSN before you're able to play them.
So what, they're having problems - so is every one else this week.... but why did it take Sony three days before admitting that they have a problem?
The first real information I was able to find was from LoveFilms homepage - with a nice, clear message saying that the PSN was having problems and they apologizes that people could not use their service. Well done Lovefilm for clear, concise information for your subscribers.
So where is the simular message on the PSN home page? Why, when the entire network is down, is there not a single mention of what is going on? Why is no PSN staffer responding to the comments made on it's blog posts about worries about credit-card details theft?
Sony have really dropped the ball here. Not in taking down the network, that was probably the correct thing to do. Not for the length of time also, as they're not going to be cutting of a revenue stream. For not telling it's worried customers what is going on without them having to dig into the blog.
