Sony Refers to PlayStation Network Downtime as a "Great Experience"

Posted 07/14/2011 at 7:53am | by Paul Lilly

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Devouring a well prepared meal at a fancy restaurant can be a great experience. So can skydiving, overclocking, sitting in the front row of a sporting event, visiting the Grand Canyon, and the list goes on, perhaps endlessly. But would you classify being repeatedly hacked to the point where you have to shut down your gaming network a "great experience?" Sony's president of network entertainment Tim Schaaff did.

"Great experience, really good time," Shaaff told VentureBeat in a sit-down interview. "Though I wouldn't like to do it again."

The high-profile attack on Sony's PlayStation Network was just one in what turned out to be a string of security breaches perpetuated by LulzSec and Anonymous, and few gamers would classify the extended PSN downtime as a "really good time." And it's not just the downtime, but the more than 100 million PSN user accounts that were compromised in the attack, as well as credit card information. Nevertheless, Schaaff says business is booming and all is well now that everything is back up and running.

"We're back online, everything's live again around the world, and the amazing thing through all of this is that the customers have all come back, and network performance is better than ever, sales are better than ever, and we've been very, very pleasantly surprised by the experience," Schaaff said. "And we're in a place where we're really looking forward again to what's next, what's new, and how we can keep growing the network. It's a pretty crazy event that we went through but we survived, and we're back strong, and ready to go."

We suppose this is Sony's way of putting on its happy face after suffering an embarrassing round of hacker attacks, and we see Schaaff's point in all this. It's just the quirky wording isn't likely to sit well with PSN subscribers who would describe the ordeal as anything but a "great experience."