You’d have to be living under a rock to remain unaware of the PlayStation Network’s major downtime the past week. But regardless of your current living conditions you’d be forgiven for being none the wiser on the cause; as Sony have been very tight-lipped on the matter.
However, a moderator of PSX-scene.com, a site dedicated to custom firmware for the PS3, has posted on reddit that the downtime is a reaction to a recent custom firmware named “Rebug”. Rebug allowed the user to turn their regular PS3 into a dev console, then using a proxy they could access the developer version of PSN. Supplying faked credit card info, which was never checked by the system, they could download anything and everything from the Playstation Store for free. In reaction to this intrusion, Sony then shut down their network in order to rebuild it with stronger security.
This is all rumour and speculation for now but given that Sony have said very little on what caused this outage and what is being done about it other than the rebuild for security, this is about the best we have for reasons on why the PSN is down at the moment.
