Starting right now, PlayStation 4 owners can use the PlayStation Plus multiplayer network for free, that too for an entire week. Here are the details.

If you happen to be a regular gamer on Sony or Microsoft’s online gaming platforms then chances are that you realized all wasn’t well in the video game world over the weekend. Sure, like any other online service, Xbox LIVE and Sony’s PlayStation Network are prone to the odd glitch here and there, which can result in downtime, but it seems that the weekend’s event was a little more serious. Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE service were both brought down simultaneously by cyber attacks over the weekend, with a group calling itself “Lizard Squad” taking responsibility for the whole thing.

Spanish police said today it has arrested three people who were allegedly involved in the PlayStation Network attacks that brought the system to a halt last month. The hackers are said to be part of “Anonymous”, a semi-centralized activist group known for bringing down several government websites in the past.

Sony is still reeling from its many, many hacker-related problems over the last few weeks. It was only yesterday that Sony finally managed to bring its PSN Store back online across the globe and then, as if the universe was trying to really kick them when they just thought things were getting better, the Music arm of Sony found itself on the wrong end of a fresh hacking attempt. But surely all their hard work behind the scenes have made PSN and Qriocity hack-proof, right? Wrong, according to one industry expert.

Remember the Welcome Back package Sony promised us by way of saying thank you for sticking by the beleaguered platform during the PSN downtime of the last few weeks? Now that the company has finally managed to bring its PSN Store back online, they’ve also announced just how this package works and more importantly, your free content can be downloaded right now if you can cope with the many error codes currently being thrown up by the service while it attempts to deal with a few million people hitting it at once.

As promised earlier this week, all PlayStation Network services are being restored today in Europe, America and most of Asia. On Tuesday, we reported that Sony intended to bring back the service by the end of the week. Today, Sony is confirming it once again in a press release.

If you’re a PlayStation Network customer, you may be happy to know you’ll likely have your services back really soon: later this week according to Sony.

What, another story about Sony? Yes, but this time it’s good news: after a month of downtime, the company is bringing some PlayStation Network services back in some parts of Asia. While there’s still no word on when US services are returning, some progress is still better than no word at all.

PlayStation Network users have been having a hard time lately, with successive hacks, followed by a long downtime which continues to this day. At least they will now be able to tell whether the service is down or not thanks to a simple iPhone App.

United States-based PlayStation Network users will now be able to register for a free Identity Protection service, thanks to an arrangement made by Sony with Debix.

Sony’s recent data breach could cost the company as much as $24.5 billion according to a new infographic put together by PromotionalCodes. The whole palaver began way back on April 19th when Sony discovered that a few PlayStation Network servers had rebooted themselves for no apparent reason. After some research and, we assume much panic, Sony took the unpleasant decision to pull its entire multiplayer network and online store off the internet the next day. The plan was to bring everything back online once the issue was resolved. That took much, much longer than any of us expected.

The last few months have been quite a PR disaster for Sony: last month, the system got hacked for the first time, and information leaked, including emails, passwords and even credit card numbers. Then, after a period of downtime, the system gets hacked again, multiple times, and just after it was just starting to be phased back in, behold: an unresolved exploit has been publicized.