After being shut down for over three weeks, Sony is finally starting to restore some services on its online console Playstation Network systems. In a new post on the Playstation Blog site, the company"s Playstation PR head Patrick Seybold announced, " ... we have begun the phased restoration by region of some of the services, starting with online multiplayer functionality."
The announcement also came with a video message from Sony Playstation"s worldwide head Kazuo Hirai. He announced that services such as online multiplayer, Music Unlimited services and support for third party software like Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and others. Playstation Home, chat, trophies and other services are also starting to be restored. The Playstation Store, where gamers can purchase games and download demos and DLC, along with downloadable movies, are still down.
At the time of this news post, services have been restored in just parts of the United States, specifically California and many of the states in the Northeastern part of the country such as New York, Main, Massachusetts, New Jersey and others. Seybold states, "It will take several hours to restore PSN throughout the entire country, so please keep checking back for the latest updates." The Playstation Europe web site has also announced that services are slowly being restored in that part of the world. As we reported earlier, all PSN users must update to the newest Playstation firmware. That update will make players change their passwords before they are allowed to sign onto the PSN network
In addition to the Playstation Network, Sony Online Entertainment has also announced that its MMO game servers are also being restored which means access to nearly all of those MMO games such as the Everquest series, DC Universe Online and others will soon be back online.