Service for Sonys PlayStation Network (PSN) is finally being restored in the US and across the globe after a long outage, but the companys home country of Japan still hasnt approved the restart of the service, according to a report by the Dow Jones Newswires.
Sony wont be allowed to restore PSN in Japan until it proves that it has followed through with preventative measures for future hacking attacks, and it has taken further measures to protect consumer credit card and personal information, Japanese official Kazushige Nobutani told Dow Jones.
Its not surprising that Japan is being more strict with Sony than other countries the companys PSN outage isnt just a stain on its reputation, it also makes Japan look bad.
We are still in talks with various authorities (in Japan and Asia), Sony spokeswoman Kumie Tanaka told Dow Jones. By receiving advice from the industry ministry, we would like to have the service in Japan ready.
Sony will likely be focusing its energy on getting PSN approved this week, now that its quickly restoring service across the world. Otherwise, the company wont be able to easily explain to Japanese gamers why theyre still blocked from PSN while the rest of the world has access to the service.
The hack on Sonys systems affected some 100 million users, including 77 million PSN users and 24 million users from its online gaming portal Station.com. Earlier this month, Sony blamed the attack on the hacking group Anonymous. Thanks to the PSN outage, PlayStation 3 users were unable to play multiplayer games, download demos, and take advantage of other services like Hulu and Netflix for almost a month.