Sony has been hit by another cyber attack after its online PlayStation store was inaccessible globally for more than two hours on Monday.
The latest outage came after last month’s hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer network, which was followed by the illegal release on piracy websites of several of its films, including its upcoming Christmas movie, Annie.
Sony Computer Entertainment said PlayStation Network was mostly down from 8.52am to 11.18am Tokyo time. Some visitors to the PlayStation online store were greeted with the message: “Page not found. It’s not you. It’s the internet’s fault.”
The company said the problem has been fixed globally, although it continues to investigate the cause of the network malfunction. Sony has not received a report so far that information has been leaked or stolen.
A group called Lizard Squad appeared to take credit for the outage as it tweeted “PSN Login #offline #LizardSquad” shortly after the website went down. The same group also tweeted “Xbox Live #offline” after users faced trouble signing on to Microsoft’s Xbox Live service last week.
For Sony, it is not the first time its PlayStation Network suffered a cyber attack, but it comes at a critical time when the struggling Japanese electronics and entertainment group is banking on its game business to drive its turnround amid lacklustre sales of smartphones and other consumer electronics.
The PlayStation Network was hacked in 2011, with perpetrators gaining access to the personal information of more than 100m users.
For the recent attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computers, rumours have swirled that North Korea was behind the hack, apparently in revenge for Sony’s upcoming film The Interview, a Seth Rogen comedy about a farcical assassination attempt on Kim Jong Un.
The country complained about the film this summer in a letter to the UN, in which it accused the US of sponsoring terrorism.
Sony Pictures Entertainment has approached the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate the illegal release of Annie, Fury, a second world war drama starring Brad Pitt, and Mr Turner, featuring Timothy Spall.
North Korea on Sunday denied responsibility for the hack, although it accused the US of targeting North Korea in its investigation.
“We do not know where in America the Sony Pictures is situated and for what wrongdoings it became the target of the attack nor [do] we feel the need to know about it,” the National Defence Commission was quoted as saying by the official Korean Central News Agency.
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