Did Sony hold out about PSN outage?

The Japanese government has reportedly accused Sony of deliberately keeping quiet about the attack on its PlayStation Network.

Sony has always said that the six day gap between the attack on PSN and its first official announcement was due to the need to "forensically" analyse exactly what has happened.

However, Kotaku repots that documentation acquired under the Freedom of Information Act suggests that Sony knew full well what data had been compromised as early as April 25th.

A day later it said via a press release that it was still assessing the actual impact.

The claims also clash with PlayStation boss Kaz Hirai’s statement on May 1st that Sony didn’t discover the extent of the attack until April 26th.

Furthermore, the report actually claims that a Sony spokesperson admitted withholding information.

"We hadn’t figured out (at that time) what kind of data had been leaked If only passwords and IDs (were breached), they cannot be considered personal information, and so we didn’t want to bewilder our customers."

The news agency originally reporting the document goes as far to claim that Sony "deliberately attempted to downplay the seriousness of the situation by not fully disclosing information".