PlayStation’s PR Faux Pas
“Sony has confirmed that user data—names, email addresses, home addresses, passwords, and possibly even credit card information—has been compromised in the “illegal and unauthorized intrusion” that occurred between April 17 and April 19 and has resulted in the worldwide PSN outage, which is now in its sixth day.”
Its sixth day? And only now they admit fault? Wow. In this social media age where every little mistake you make is visible within a matter of minutes, six days later they admit a lapse in security.
I can’t help but wonder with a little disaster recovery social media efforts they could have made this huge issue a little softer to handle for their customers. By informing the customers as soon as it happened that it had happened, these gamers they could have gotten to work changing their passwords, getting onto their credit card companies etc to feel a little more secure, instead of confusing millions of gamers by taking down the PlayStation Network (PSN) without explanation. Would have made a difference? I think if it was me, I would feel a lot better knowing the company was not trying to bury their head in the sand.
As far as I can see, the only explaination PlayStation gave to their gamers was this quite unapologetic blog post by the company’s senior Director of Corporate Communications & Social Media Patrick Seybold on the 26th of April (nearly 10 days after the incident) and before that a less than helpful blog post on the 21st of April that read:
“We’re aware certain functions of PlayStation Network are down. We will report back here as soon as we can with more information”.
Their twitter and facebook accounts were very quiet on the matter and it seems a lot of tweet queries went unanswered.
One users bank seemed to know more about the matter than PlayStation did:
