Sony is responding to yesterdays quotes that it plans to have the PlayStation Network fully operation by May 31st by now saying that it has no specific time frame for when the service will be restored.
It could be sooner… but it will likely be later the way this train wreck is unfolding.
And, of course, there is no mention of SOE at all.
SOE is arguably suffering more damage to its image than the PlayStation side of the business. Sure, the PlayStation Network is down, but I can still stream Netflix, watch movies, and play (and even patch) my few PS3 games. I have a tangible piece of hardware that still does things.
But SOE is down so hard it might as well be dead, and we know nothing about what may come to pass or when or what it will mean in the longer term.
I appreciate that SOE doesn’t have much to say, or cannot go into great detail, or is restricted by the corporate lawyers from saying anything of substance, but the daily posting on their Facebook page, like this one from yesterday:
SOE services will remain offline today. We continue to work diligently to bring things back as quickly as possible and appreciate your continued patience.
essentially say nothing at this point. You can only rephrase “not today!” so many ways before people become restive or resort to parody.
There is literally nothing coming out of SOE but this Facebook drip. Even Karen at Massively is pulling from pre-attack interviews to keep up their regular EQII feature.
Is this all-but-silent treatment really the best plan?
Addendum:
A new informationless posting at the PlayStation Blog:
I know you all want to know exactly when the services will be restored. At this time, I can’t give you an exact date, as it will likely be at least a few more days. We’re terribly sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we work through this process.
A few more days sounds good, but so does “soon” and we know how that word has been abused in the past.
Nothing further from SOE. I expect at some point this afternoon we’ll read on Facebook that SOE games won’t be up today. Check back tomorrow.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
This has been a great exercise in seeing which gaming sites are still cozy with SOE.
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Well, Karen is there explicitly to cover EQII, among other things, and she has a weekly column to fill, so she has to talk about something other than the outage.
But that is just it, if you take an online gaming company off-line and they restrict themselves to a couple of sentence a day on Facebook, is there anything left with which to be cozy?
I am sure that the community team, the producers, and probably even Smed, are chafing under this gag order that no doubt came from on high. Somebody at corporate (or SCEA) is not doing SOE any favors.
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going dark on public statements is a PR issue not really a technical issue
Right now my sense is that they don’t have a handle on what the extent of compromise is and they don’t full know when they will know.
The month statement was probably based on the assumption that the recovery would be fully funded and performed quickly. But with the numbers and lead times for data center refurbish… well someone said whoa let’s talk about this.
The bad thing is that the proverbial clock is ticking. If they go longer than a month then they won’t have viable online assets to support.
I know they know this but this compromise is unprecedented in commercial systems.
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I’m baffled by their operations process. Most websites when hacked are back up in less than a day, or a few days at most. What’s going on at Sony that they’re down for weeks and maybe weeks more? They are literally destroying their own business right now; the problems must be very bad.
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We are Anonymous
We are legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget
Expect us
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In my talks with PS3 support, they hoped PSN would be up sooner than end of the month. No date given of course.
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@Anon_CW: You’re also not very anonymous when you you post from the same IP address you’ve used to make other comments.
Not exactly ‘leet haxor skills there.
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@Wilhelm I was speaking more in the realm of I haven’t seen much negative coverage of the downtime from some sites , not the fulfillment of normal content quotas.
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Eric/Cyanbane – How can there be any negative coverage? They haven’t told us anything since the 4th.
Everything coming out of Sony is focused on PSN because the SCEA people are taking the lead in talking to the press (since they own SOE now), and they only talk about PSN. SOE gets a next-to-last paragraph mention once in a while, but it generally has less information than SOE’s Facebook status.
I think, in a way, SOE is suffering from simply being ignored. What if an online service went down and nobody cared enough to report on it?
But you’ve piqued my curiosity. I might have to go through the gaming sites a little more thoroughly just to see what, if anything, is getting mentioned about SOE. Not much has shown up in my reader.
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@Wilhelm – The lack of coverage is the tip of the iceberg personally. As a paying subscriber I am more than pissed (sorry a few PSP/PS3 arcade titles won’t satiate me). Excluding player originating forums on the sites most major gaming sites are not giving SOE any grief, only reporting on the outage. The old EQ2-Daily spider is still running (even though the site is frozen) and I still see what it crawls and there is an overwhelming majority of ‘I hope it comes back soon’ instead of ‘is this what I am paying for??!?’. I understand downtimes and such, and personally I feel 24h is a stretch, when they are 1 week+ they should be feeling it in their pocketbook and with goodwill. Its unacceptable. Sorry for the Eric/cyanbane confusion, posting from 2 diff boxes and each had its own idea of autofill.
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@Cyanbane – I wonder if this is SOE’s tight-lipped policy succeeding. When all they are saying on a daily basis is “still not up” there isn’t anything new to report.
On the other hand, if Smed came out with a statement, even a very heart-felt apology where he promised us all more free time and a pair of Tiffany cuff links, it would be plastered all over, quoted and dissected and SOE would look worse for the effort.
I keep posting about it because I was invested in two SOE games before the take down, but even I am event driven. Sony has to say something first, and even then I have to note that SOE is completely left out of any mention.
All I have is the downtime counter on the main page here. I am surprised I haven’t seen more of that sort of thing.
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