Sony explains six day wait

With the catastrophic security failure that has blighted PSN all over the national press this morning, Sony has attempted to address the main criticism currently being thrown its way – why did it wait six days to inform customers?

"There’s a difference in timing between when we identified there was an intrusion and when we learned of consumers’ data being compromised," the firm said in a statement.

"We learned there was an intrusion 19th April and subsequently shut the services down. We then brought in outside experts to help us learn how the intrusion occurred and to conduct an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the incident.

"It was necessary to conduct several days of forensic analysis, and it took our experts until yesterday to understand the scope of the breach. We then shared that information with our consumers and announced it publicly yesterday evening."

Last night the story featured on the breaking news banners of both BBC and Sky news, and mainstream news outlets have been chasing members of both the games press and games industry for comment since the early hours.