Japan halts Sony PSN restoration; Wants more clarification

Tokyo, May 16: Japan government has not yet approved the online gaming giant Sony to restart their PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment videogame services, which was taken offline on Apr 20 after hacking intrusion by unknown hackers.

While Sony restored the PlayStation and Qriocity services in US, Europe and some of the Asian countries, it is not allowed to restart the service in Japan, where Sony has a strong fan base for its online games. Japanese regulatory authority said that the online gaming service will be allowed until Sony provides further information on what measures it has taken since an earlier hacking incident.

"We met with Sony on May 6 and 13, and basically we want two things from them. Kazushige Nobutani, director of the Media and Content Industry department at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said.

"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," Nobutani said. "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," he further added.

While announcing the restoration of PSN services, Sony rolled out a new PS3 system software mandatory update, asking all PSN users to change their password.

Meanwhile, even after restoring the services, PSN went offline for more than half-an-hour as millions of users tried to change their passwords at a time, causing a heavy load of password resets. Sony requested its users to have patience for the services to resume.

OneIndia News