TOKYO—Sony Corp. failed to meet the deadline it had set to restore the PlayStation Network, keeping millions of irritated videogamers offline for another weekend as the company continued to conduct internal safety checks to defend a new system against hackers.
The setback comes after Sony said Saturday it removed the personal information of 2,500 sweepstakes participants posted unbeknownst to the company on a website affiliated with Sony Electronics. The information was discovered as part of the investigation of the intrusions into the company's system, but the data listed didn't include individuals' credit-card information, according to a Sony statement released Saturday.
Sony executives had said May 1 that they were aiming to get parts of the service back up within the week, while a full system reboot would take until the end of the month. A Sony spokesman on Saturday declined to specify a new time frame when the system can be expected to be back online.
The electronics company posted an announcement on its PlayStation blog late Friday explaining the prolonged delay to customers.
"When we held the press conference in Japan last week, based on what we knew, we expected to have the services online within a week," wrote Patrick Seybold, senior director of corporate communications and social media, on the blog. "We were unaware of the extent of the attack on Sony Online Entertainment servers, and we are taking this opportunity to conduct further testing of the incredibly complex system."
The announcement is likely to test the patience of the PlayStation community amid Sony's slow and opaque handling of the matter. Sony abruptly shut down its network, which connects 77 million players around the world, on April 20 after hackers got past the system's firewalls and compromised customer data. Sony didn't disclose the reasons for the system interruption until six days later.
Many comments left on Sony's blog in response to the latest update expressed frustration at the extended offline period.
"This wait is becoming so tedious. I know there needs to be a lot of testing, but it is really getting annoying. I am seriously considering changing to the xbox," wrote a commenter by the name of CryonicUCX on Friday, referring to a rival system sold by Microsoft Corp.
Others echoed the sentiment, with multiple commenters describing the outage as "excessive."
Meanwhile, another common sentiment was a lack of surprise: "I think I'm used to the waiting by now. Thanks for the update," wrote Tom Hoang.
The customer information inadvertently published on a Sony Electronics website didn't reveal sensitive data such as credit-card and Social Security numbers and is unrelated to the PlayStation Network. The company said the site exposed names and partial mailing addresses of contestants in a 2001 sweepstakes on an "out-of-date and inactive" website. The site was taken down immediately after the company was notified on May 5.
Nevertheless, the posting adds an unwelcome wrinkle to Sony's security saga as it fights to retain customers and repair its reputation after the massive data breach.
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