Sony Will Extend PS Plus and PS Now Services After Outage

[Exterminator]

Content source

http://news.softpedia.com/news/sony-will-extend-ps-plus-and-ps-now-services-after-outage-498460.shtml

Sony promised to extend the PlayStation 4 Plus, PlayStation Now, and video rental services after they went offline yesterday.

Sony didn’t have the best start in 2016 as most of its online services were down yesterday and no explanation was given. This problem comes after the previous outage affected the same services on Christmas, and it seems that it’s a recurring issue that Sony is not able to fix or at least improve upon it.

Most likely, Sony was the target of yet another DDOS attack, which is something that’s happening quite a lot during the holidays. Xbox and Steam were also affected, but it looks like Sony has been hit the hardest. Yesterday outage lasted almost half a day, which is quite a lot actually. The fact that the reason is unknown only compounds the problem.

Sony is trying to keep the community happy
When millions of people can’t use the services they are paying for, they tend to not be happy and maybe not spend too much money on something that doesn’t work or that fails during peak hours.

Sony knows this very well, and it’s trying to do something before things get out of hand. The company went to Twitter and said that an important announcement is coming regarding the extension of the PlayStation 4 Plus, PlayStation Now, and video rental services.

This is pretty much all they said, but don’t expect to see a huge extension of these services. They will probably apologize as well. The problem remains, and the PlayStation services seem to be vulnerable.

Steam had a big problem during the holidays, but they managed to fix it rather quickly. Even so, people could still play pretty much anything they wanted, including multiplayer, since it’s not tied to a subscription. Make sure to pay attention in the next few days for the announced extension.

Thanks for your patience today - stay tuned for details on PS Plus, PS Now, and video rental extensions. — PlayStation (@PlayStation) January 5, 2016

 

[Who me?]

Sony needs lots of work. I sometimes get to play around an hour or two before being kicked offline.

 

[Ink]

Sony needs lots of work. I sometimes get to play around an hour or two before being kicked offline.

I can stay connected to PSN for weeks or months at a time, with exceptions to DDoS attacks and other outages. If you cannot stay connected for more than 2 hours per day, then it's a problem with your Internet connection/Router/ISP.

It's very difficult to deflect DDoS attacks, when it happens to Xbox Live or PlayStation Network, or anyone else. It's DDoS Protection is NOT cheap, and keeping a service running needs maintenance. Waiting to hear more complaints about maintenance downtimes.

From 2014

"...I spoke to two cybersecurity analysts in an attempt to at least make an educated guess as to how this could have happened. And although it's hard to parse the specifics of this particular attack without hearing directly from Sony, those analysts made one thing very clear: Today, it's harder than ever to stop these sort of attacks.

"There are a few reasons why DDoS attacks are bigger, more frequent, and in some cases more difficult to stop than they were in the past," said Dan Shugrue, director of product marketing at the cloud service provider Akamai Technologies. Though Shugrue couldn't comment on the specifics of the PlayStation Network attack, as Sony is an Akamai client, he said there are increasingly powerful tools that anyone can download and use to trigger denials of service."​

Source: http://kotaku.com/how-ddos-attacks-work-and-why-theyre-so-hard-to-stop-1676445620

Reference to costs (prices may vary)

"...priced based on bandwidth and the number of sites protected. List price for up to five sites and 75Mbps is $15,000 per month."​

Source: Akamai brews up more delicious Kona security tools

 

[Exterminator]

Sony needs lots of work. I sometimes get to play around an hour or two before being kicked offline.

Are you on a wireless connection and is your NAT open or strict