Here’s the post from today’s Game Junkie blog on Stuff, just in case you have trouble viewing the original on a mobile device (as one dear reader informed me).

Update:  Sony have released another statement about the breach and said that personal information such your identity, date of birth and credit card information may indeed be compromised, and you should be on the look out for any form of identity theft. You can read the full release here (thanks to VG247)

PlayStation Network compromised

Anyone trying to connect to the PlayStation Network over the Easter break would have had a bit of trouble. It’s been offline for the past five days due to an “external intrusion”.

Just in time for the Easter long weekend, the PlayStation Network struck problems late last week, and on April 21, Patrick Seybold, Sony’s senior director of corporate communications and social media, announced on its official blog that “While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running. Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this matter. Please stay tuned to this space for more details, and we’ll update you again as soon as we can.”

Sony decided to take the network offline and rebuild it rather than compromise its security. PlayStation users trying to log in to the network were confronted with a 80710A06 error. Games were still able to update if necessary, though.

Personally, I can see where they are coming from given that credit card details and the like are stored on the network’s servers. This morning, Ars Technica reported that Satoshi Fukuoka, a spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment in Tokyo, spoke with PCWorld and claimed the company “has not yet determined if the personal information or credit card numbers of users have been compromised, but that Sony would promptly inform users if it found that was the case.”

At 9.15 last night, when I tried to log on, I got a “PlayStation Network is undergoing maintenance” message. I haven’t tried this morning but clearly this is a major problem for Sony.

For you PlayStation 3 owners out there, has the length of the network outage dented your faith in the robustness of the Japanese gaming company’s PlayStation Network or do you think Sony has done the right thing by shutting down the network and rebuilding it from the ground up?

In other news, Nintendo has announced that its new console, codenamed Project Cafe, will be playable at this year’s E3 convention in Los Angeles in June, and be released in 2012. VG247 reports that one of the rumours doing the rounds is that the controller will have a touch screen.

Now that it has been confirmed, what are your thoughts – especially if there is a screen in the controller (if so, it’ll end the fight over the TV – just turn on the console and use the screen on the controller!).