Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) serves as the intercommunications backbone for multiplayer games on the PlayStation 3, as well as an e-commerce system for downloadable content for PS3 and the PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld console. So a protracted PSN outage of almost a week is setting off alarm bells around the game industry, especially because Sony, perhaps taking a page from Apple, is remaining Sphinx-like and offering very few details.

Matt Peckham offers some perspective on speculation that the problem is related to a recent tool that unlocks development features of the PS3, which may have enabled users to steal content and possibly even credit card information.

If we just take Sony at its word, all we know for sure is that the trigger was someone (or a group of someones) gaining illicit access to the PlayStation Network. We don’t know which aspect of the PSN Sony’s referring to, or whether the developer version intertwines in some fundamental way with the public version. We don’t know when it happened, or what exactly went down, or what sort of information the ‘external intrusion’ may have extracted.”

Update, 5:10 PM ET: Turns out that the PSN outage is bad news – really bad news. Sony confirms there was a security issue that caused them to take down the network. User account information has been compromised, including, quite possibly, credit card numbers. Sony’s latest comments on the issue can be read here.

Did Custom ‘Rebug’ Firmware Kill Sony’s PlayStation Network? [Time Techland]