Sony Corp (ADR) (NYSE:SNE) gaming device the PlayStation 4 has been bought in huge numbers on the occasion of New Year and Christmas. However, the customers who had plans of spending the festive season playing their favorite games on the device were left disappointed because of the network outages that took some time to get fixed. Hence, Sony wants to compensate for the discomfort and inconvenience caused.
“….we wanted to show our appreciation for your patience by offering all PlayStation Plus members that had an active membership or free trial on December 25th a membership extension of five day,’ read a blog post.
Sony makes up for goof-up
All the purchases made at the PlayStation Store will be eligible for receiving a 10% discount from Sony Computer Entertainment America. This will be available on all things including games, TV shows and movies, and the timing of the discount will be announced by the company later. The DDoS (denial-of-service) attacks had led to an outage that lasted for several days, therefore to express its gratitude to people, who have kept patience all along. Sony is offering the discount.
In a blog post, it was mentioned by Eric Lempel of Sony Corp (ADR) (NYSE:SNE) that an extended membership of five-days will be given to all the PlayStation Plus members, who had with active memberships or free trial on 25th of December.
Not all users happy
Majority of the users seemed happy with the offer from the company, but there were a small bunch of unhappy and dissatisfied users as well. One of the unhappy users commented, “What I would like, more than anything else, is an explanation from Sony about how and why this will never happen again.” Another said that the company should spend more money on strengthening and diversifying the network infrastructure, which would help assure prevention of such attacks in future, and the recovery from those will also be simplified.
In an earlier blog post, Sony Corp (ADR) (NYSE:SNE) tried explaining the issue and defended itself saying that it fell prey to an attack that was meant to disrupt connectivity and online game play by creating artificially high-levels of traffic designed for that purpose. The culprit behind these DDoS attacks is said to be the hacker group ‘Lizard Squad,’ which also targeted Microsoft’s Xbox Live game network.
MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom claimed that he persuaded the hacker group to stop the attacks on the gaming networks by offering lifetime memberships on his file-transfer site Mega.
