Sony PlayStation Network still down after 6 days of outage

CNET reports Sony's PlayStation Network is still offline, the service is down six days and counting and there's still no news on when PSN will be back in business.

The PlayStation Network (and Qriocity, Sony's cloud music subscription service that has also been taken down) has more than 70 million users worldwide and allows people to download TV shows and movies and video games to their PlayStation consoles. Both services went down in the middle of last week. Since then the company has said it is rebuilding the network.

The downtime is also bad news for developers, especially independent developers who've made games for PSN and rely on download revenues to make a living.

Dylan Cuthbert of Q-Games told IndustryGamers that he's already taken a financial hit in the last few days.

"PSN being out definitely affects our bottom line, but as long as the people who were going to be playing Shooter 2 and other PixelJunk titles will get right back in there playing them when it comes back up we'll be happy and hopefully income won't be dented too much," he said.

Sony is still pretty mum about the issue, but word is out on the Internet that the company may be in the process of rebuilding its network after hackers found a way to download PSN content for free:

Sony shut down its Playstation Network after a new custom firmware version for the console let users download games and content with a fake credit card number, according to a moderator from Playstation fan-site PSX-Scene.

The moderator, who posted the information on news aggregator Reddit under the user name chesh420, said the latest version of a custom firmware for the Playstation 3 called Rebug.me let Playstation 3 owners with that firmware installed access a developer network. They could then put in a fake credit card number and download content as they pleased without any kind of verification of the number on Sony’s back-end.