This was supposed to be Sony's year. PlayStation 3 sales were on the uptick and, back in January, the Tokyo-based electronics giant introduced its upcoming game handheld, currently codenamed Next Generation Portable or NGP. Then disaster struck, not once but several times. For Sony, 2011 is really starting to suck.
On March 11, an earthquake rocked Japan — soon after, a devastating tsunami ravaged the country's northeastern coast. According to Prime Minister Naoto Kan, the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake is the most difficult challenge the nation has faced since World War II. The disaster has destroyed lives, supply chains and factories — including Sony's. But for Sony, things were going to get still worse.
The PlayStation Network, Sony's online gaming service, was attacked by computer-hackers in mid-April, and the company waited a week to inform PSN users as it attempted to verify what happened. The intrusion took the PSN offline, and more than 75 million PSN accounts were exposed, making the hack the largest data theft in history. Players were outraged. U.S. politicians, including Sen. Richard Blumenthal demanded to know how a hack of this scale could happen. Class-action lawsuits wanted to know the same thing. This week, Sony appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives as a Congressional subcommittee works on new data-protection legislation that could be introduced within weeks.