PlayStation Network and Qriocity users what you’ve feared most has come true – today Patrick Seybold Sr. Director, Corporate Communications & Social Media for Sony posted on the US PlayStation blog that before the PlayStation Network and Qriocity services went offline personal information such as Addresses, zip codes and purchase history were compromised.

 We have discovered that between April 17 and April 19, 2011, certain PlayStation Network and Qriocity service user account information was compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into our network. 

Further on Patrick alerts all users that Sony will not contact you asking for any personally identifiable information such as your social security or credit card number. Its goes without saying that scams will be on the rise; therefor, PlayStation Network and Qriocity users are urged “to be especially aware of email, telephone, and postal mail scams that ask for personal or sensitive information”.

There is a bright side to this seemingly dark post – the team at Sony working on restoring the PlayStation and Qriocity “have a clear path to have PlayStation Network and Qriocity systems back online, and expect to restore some services within a week.”

It’s also important that when services are restored users change their passwords as well as look over recent account summary and monitor your credit reports – you want to make sure your account is secure still.

So to all those frustrated by the outage that have taken to the web to criticize Sony and the job they’ve done – to end this post here’s the final paragraph to the outage update, and please remember if Sony didn’t love their users they would offer a paid service like Xbox LIVE.

 Sony takes information protection very seriously and will continue to work to ensure that additional measures are taken to protect personally identifiable information. Providing quality and secure entertainment services to our customers is our utmost priority. Please contact us at 1-800-345-7669 should you have any additional questions.