Sony brings services back online after massive hack

Sony has finally begun the process of bringing key media and gaming services back online after the recent large-scale hack of its network, although the company was forced temporarily to suspend the restoration owing to high demand.

Sony Computer Entertainment president Kazuo Hirai revealed in a video on Saturday that the firm has been working round the clock to bring the services online since the major data breach in April which may have exposed the details of up to 100 million customers.

"I wish we could have restored the network services faster but these attacks were serious and sophisticated and it simply took time to install and test the new security measures across our entire system," he said.

"The service is being restored in phases and I'm pleased to say the first phase has now been launched in most regions of the world."

These services include sign-in for PlayStation Network and Qriocity, online gameplay across PSP and PS3, Music Unlimited, access to third-party services, chat functions and more, Hirai explained.

Sony has also been improving its security to include increased levels of encryption, additional firewalls and "an early warning detection system for any unusual activity which could signal an attack on the network", said Hirai.

However, the restoration of services soon hit a snag owing to the large numbers of customers waiting to get back online.

The official Sony PlayStation Twitter account showed the following message on Sunday evening: "We're experiencing a heavy load of password resets and will be turning off the services for 30 minutes to clear the queue."

A later tweet noted: "It's taking time to clear all of the ISPs, so please give it a bit of time to reach your email."

It is still unclear who was responsible for the attack, although some reports suggested that it could be certain rogue members of Anonymous, who decided to take the online hacktivist group's denial-of-service attacks one stage further by instigating a huge data breach.

It emerged over the weekend that the attacks may have been launched from Amazon Web Services' EC2 public cloud infrastructure.