You won't hear much about the five day long Sony Playstation Network outage on regular media. Local news generally hasn't mentioned it, radio reports seem quiet, and there's no room for it in the Situation Room on CNN.
But in a certain demographic, people have lost their minds. "I hope they bloody tell us" when the network will be back up says one Twitter user. Richard Lawler at Engadget dryly points out the difference between the Xbox and Playstation versions of new game Portal 2: "The Xbox 360 version comes with a working online service."
The anger comes as the Playstation network, which connects gamers for online play, suffers its fifth day of outages. Sony blames an "intruder", which most people read as "hacker."
The story has not created many waves outside the gaming community, probably because those who do not play online games don't understand the scope of online gaming.
So we'll explain it to you. It's like Brian Williams, urbane and handsome anchor of the Nightly News on NBC going missing for a solid week. On a bender.
Our math? On a solid night, Williams draws in roughly 9 million viewers per night. By comparison, Playstation Network boasts 70 million registered users.
Now, we can hear our 7th grade math teacher Mr. Hertel objecting: "The number of registered users is not necessarily indicative of the actual users" or some such nonsense.
Tech
To which way say "It's an analogy. We suggest Brian Williams is capable of going on a bender and all you notice is the math?"
Point being, if Williams attracts 9 million, it would take him 7.7 days to get to PSN's audience of 70 million.
It's not just games that are missing. Sony's network also allows PS3 users to access Netflix and baseball's MLB.com. Worse, there is some concern that "external intrusion" may have allowed someone to access users' personal data, though Sony isn't saying.
At least if Brian were to [God forbid -eds] disappear, he wouldn’t take our credit cards with him.
