Sony extends memberships, discounts after PSN outage

Sony is trying to make nice after hackers ruined the Christmas holiday for millions of its Playstation users. The company is offering a free membership extension for PlayStation Plus members and a one-time discount to all users of the Playstation Network.

“Since access to PlayStation Network was impacted during the holidays, we wanted to show our appreciation for your patience,” wrote Sony VP Eric Lempel in a blog post to customers.

With “impacted,” Lempel is obliquely referring to the devastating denial of service attack that brought Sony’s Playstation network down for three days. During the outage, users reported difficulty creating new accounts, logging into existing accounts, and redeeming download codes. A hacker group called Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the attack, as well as a similar one on the Xbox Live network also orchestrated on Christmas.

To assuage its justifiably annoyed customers, Sony is now promising an automatic, five-day extension of any membership of Playstation Plus for any user who had a active membership or free trial on December 25. Of course, the network outage did not only affect Playstation Plus members, so Sony will also provide a 10 percent discount code good for a one-time discount off a total cart purchase in the PlayStation Store to all Playstation Network members. The code will be offered “sometime this month.”

The question now is whether Sony’s peace offering is enough. On the one hand, the hacker attack was not Sony’s fault, so the company is arguably not on the hook for any recompense at all. Furthermore, in purely monetary terms, the discounts and extensions are more than fair compensation for the hours lost. On the other hand though, a ruined Christmas is nearly impossible to replace, at least for another 365 days.

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