Game network down for hours

PlayStation Network, Sony’s online video game marketplace and future digital distribution platform for movies and music, was down for several hours Tuesday, prompting angst among some of its 8 million subscribers.

Sony Corp. spokesman Patrick Seybold urged calm, saying the outage was part of an announced “routine scheduled maintenance.” This one took four hours and 45 minutes, during which time the PlayStation Store was shuttered and no online games could be played.

“Nothing really at play here,” Seybold said in an e-mail. “It is just a slightly longer update than normal.”

That hasn’t stopped some players from getting the impression that they were banned or that something darker was afoot. In the always-on Internet era, take an outage, add a minor information vacuum and, voila! You have the ingredients for an international corporate conspiracy.

Hmmm, sounds like the makings of a good game!