Sony's PSN breach exposed 77M accounts — and the network was down 23 days

In April 2011, Sony's PlayStation Network (PSN) and Qriocity music service were breached by hackers who stole the personal data of approximately 77 million user accounts — names, addresses, email addresses, passwords, and in some cases, credit card numbers.

Sony took the PSN offline for 23 days while it investigated and rebuilt its security infrastructure. The outage was the longest in the history of a major gaming platform, and it affected millions of gamers worldwide who could not access online multiplayer, digital purchases, or their account data.

Sony paid approximately $171 million in costs related to the breach, including customer compensation, security upgrades and legal settlements. The case illustrated how a gaming platform's always-online architecture creates a single point of failure, and how the delay in disclosure (Sony waited over a week to inform users) compounds the damage.