Hackers knock out PlayStation Network

Service has been down for five days and no resolution date has been set

Sony's online gaming service, the PlayStation Network (PSN), has been offline for almost a week following a cyber attack on 20 April.

Sony said on its PlayStation blog that it has shut the service down while it investigates the security breach.

"In order to conduct a thorough investigation and verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward, we turned off PlayStation Network services on the evening of Wednesday, 20 April."

A comment on the blog from user 'wakingthedead17' said: "Freaking Anonymous. This isn't hurting Sony, it's hurting the people who want to play games online."

Hacktivist group Anonymous recently announced an intention to attack Sony, and the PSN in particular, after the company pursued two of its members through the courts for releasing details of its proprietary code.

However, the group has denied responsibility for this outage.

Sony has provided no date as yet for the resumption of PSN services.