Sony said a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack took PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network offline on August 24, 2014. The services were back online by the time of Sony’s update, and Sony said it had seen no evidence that attackers accessed users’ personal information. This was separate from the destructive Sony Pictures Entertainment intrusion disclosed in late November 2014; the FBI’s later attribution of that incident to North Korea does not identify who was responsible for the PSN outage.
What happened to PlayStation Network on August 24?
Sony said a DDoS attack overwhelmed PlayStation Network (PSN) and Sony Entertainment Network, taking both offline. In its August 24, 2014 PlayStation Blog update, the company wrote: “The networks were taken offline due to a distributed denial of service attack.” Sony said service had been restored when it published the update.
A DDoS attack aims to disrupt availability by sending enough traffic to make a service struggle to respond. Sony described the incident as “artificially high traffic.” TIME’s contemporary explainer described legitimate and malicious requests competing for a service’s capacity. The cited accounts do not establish the traffic volume, botnet size, exploit used, mitigation provider, or exact duration of the outage.
When was PSN down, and how long did it last?
TIME reported that the disruption began early on August 24 and that access had returned by the following morning, although its writer still encountered problems. Sony’s update confirmed that the networks were back online but did not give a precise outage duration. An exact number of hours is therefore not established by these accounts.
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Did the PSN attackers steal users’ personal information?
Sony said it had seen no evidence of a network intrusion or unauthorized access to user information. Its August 24 update stated: “We have seen no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorised access to users’ personal information.” That is Sony’s account of what it had observed at the time, not an independently verified guarantee.
Who was responsible for the PSN DDoS?
Responsibility was disputed in contemporary reporting. TIME noted competing claims, including one from Lizard Squad and another from someone associated with Anonymous. Those claims do not establish who carried out the attack, and the cited accounts do not provide a definitive attribution for the PSN DDoS.
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How was the August PSN outage different from the Sony Pictures hack?
They were separate incidents affecting different parts of Sony. The PSN event was an availability disruption in August; the later Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) incident involved destructive malware and stolen data. The fact that both occurred in 2014 does not establish that the DDoS caused, enabled, or formed part of the SPE intrusion.
| Incident | When and what was affected | Reported effect | Attribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| PSN / Sony Entertainment Network DDoS | August 24, 2014; online services | Services were taken offline and later restored. Sony said it saw no evidence of unauthorized access to user information. | No definitive attribution established in the cited contemporary account. |
| Sony Pictures Entertainment intrusion | Disclosed in late November 2014; SPE systems and data | The FBI described destructive malware and theft of proprietary and employee information. | The FBI stated on December 19, 2014 that North Korea was responsible for the SPE incident. |
In its December 19 statement, the FBI said its conclusion about the SPE attack drew on technical and infrastructure evidence, including destructive malware and data theft. That attribution applies to the Sony Pictures incident—not to the August PSN DDoS.
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