Outage of the PlayStation network today sparked unconfirmed rumours that the downtime may be down to a denial of service attack.

Perhaps the PSN network is just having a bit of a nap, but global problems in logging into the online gaming network have given rise to speculation that it is due either to a DDoS or hacking from a group trying to get Sony to abandon its court fight against PS3 modders.

Security expert and dedicated gamer Chris Boyd of GFI Software confirmed the outage but warned it would be rash to ascribe causes just yet.

"It's definitely offline (all PSN website portals have it flagged as red at the moment) although there's no way to confirm at the moment what the cause could be," Boyd Told El Reg. "It does go offline from time to time for tweaking, but as you rightly point out there's a been a lot of DDoS taking place recently."

Freewheeling hacking collective Anonymous launched an operation against Sony – OpSony – earlier this month in protest against the entertainment giant's lawsuits against PS3 modders. OpSony led to outages in a number of Sony-related websites just over two weeks ago. Whether this operation has since been extended to the PlayStation Network itself remains unclear. ®