Sony flipped the switch on PSN Saturday, but a significant chunk of the PlayStation 3 gaming population is still offline. The problem? A bottleneck in the tubes as millions of PlayStation Network users attempted to reset their passwords at roughly the same time. In Japan, however, Sony's home base, there is a completely different issue: the government is unsatisfied with Sony's new security measures.
Posting on the official PlayStation blog last night, Communications Director Patrick Seybold said Sony was inundated with password resets and had to turn off PSN once again to clear the queue. And though the outage was brief for most, many are still waiting for their password reset request to be completed.
"If you've requested your password reset, please give it a bit of time to reach your email," Seybold said. "Thanks for your patience as we work to get everyone back online."
Seybold's European counterpart, Nick Caplin, confirmed PSN users in his part of the world were experiencing much the same problem. Caplin noted that anxious PS3 gamers should refrain from submitting multiple requests as it will only further gum-up the works.
For PSN users in Japan, however, password resets aren't even an option yet. The Japanese government's media and content industry department at the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry won't allow Sony to restore PSN because the company's enhanced security measures are "incomplete."
"We met with Sony on May 6 and 13, and basically we want two things from them," department Director Kazushige Nobutani told Dow Jones Newswires. "The first is preventative measures. As of May 13, Sony was incomplete in exercising measures that they said they will do on the May 1 press conference."
In addition, the Japanese government evidently believes Sony has not yet done enough to regain the trust of consumers whose personal information was stolen. "There were similar cases in the past that were caused by other firms, and we are asking Sony whether their measures are good enough when compared to countermeasures taken in the past," Nobutani said.
Sony issued a response in a brief statement: "We are still in talks with various authorities. By receiving advice from the industry ministry, we would like to have the service in Japan ready."
