Sony Press Conference Confirms Partial Service to be Restored This Week

Posted 05/01/2011 at 7:26am | by Justin Kerr

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Sony held a press conference in Tokyo this morning to discuss the future of its Playstation Network, and amazingly it could be another 4 weeks until everything is back to normal. Company officials described the restoration process as a “rolling” effort, with some services coming back online this week, but others such as the Playstation Store being pushed towards the end of the month. The company wasn’t specific as to which services are being assigned top priority, however, I’m sure most users are pleased to see Sony giving the free aspects of the service preferential treatment over clear money makers such as the store. 

“I am deeply sorry for worrying, and inconveniencing, our users,” Kazuo Hirai, Sony’s executive deputy president, said, bowing deeply. Despite the blow to Sony’s online reputation, Kazuo Hirai claims online networking services will remain central to Sony’s business strategy going forward. The company for example is still planning to expand the Qriocity service later in the year to enable audio and video streaming across Sony branded Blu-Ray players, and several high end TV’s.

In terms of new information the press conference didn’t tell us much the company hadn’t already disclosed, and Mr. Hirai still claims an investigation is ongoing to confirm the severity of the information leak. In terms of credit card information for example, the company still can’t say for sure if hackers were able to bypass their encryption. User name and passwords were definitely store in the clear however, so expect to be prompted to change your password once service is restored.