In a Friday post entitled "For Once, It Wasn't Us" Anonymous wrote:
"While it could be the case that other Anons have acted by themselves AnonOps was not related to this incident and takes no responsibility for it. A more likely explanation is that Sony is taking advantage of Anonymous' previous ill-will towards the company to distract users from the fact the outage is actually an internal problem with the companies servers."
On Thursday, Sony announced it had shut down the PlayStation Network for a "full day or two" to investigate an unknown outage, which it confirmed the day before. Reports also said that Sony Computer Entertainment Europe had posted its suspicions about a hacking attempt, but by press time, the European PlayStation blog had been apparently edited to mimic the U.S. version.
On Friday morning Sony posted another update hinting at the work of hackers, "An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services," it wrote in a blog post.
In March Anonymous briefly took down the PlayStation Network to kickstart "Operation Sony," a campaign meant to cripple Sony for its recent lawsuits against PS3 hackers.
But within days, Anonymous reversed the hack due to complaints from gamers that the takedown was doing more harm than good, and hacked into the Sony Careers page instead. Anonymous also organized an in-store boycott.
Meanwhile, earlier this month PS3 hacker George "Geohot" Hotz and Sony settled their suit, and Hotz agreed to a permanent injunction against posting information that Sony wanted removed. Sony sued Hotz in January for hacking the Sony PS3 and posting his circumvention technique on his Web site, as well as links for others to do the same.