Sony said it would resume some services on its PlayStation Network this week and offer incentives to customers to try to prevent them turning to competitors after the theft of personal information belonging to 78 million user accounts.
Sony executives apologised for the massive data breach at a news conference in Tokyo today, the first public comments from senior management on the crisis.
"We apologise deeply for causing great unease and trouble to our users," Kazuo Hirai, Sony's number two and the frontrunner to succeed chief executive Howard Stringer, said at a lengthy news conference.
Many PlayStation users around the world had been angered by the fact that the first warning of one of the largest internet security break-ins ever came a week after Sony detected a problem with the network on April 19th.
The warning that user credit card information might have been stolen also came just hours after Sony unveiled its first tablet computers at an event where executives made no mention of the PlayStation breach.
Today's news sparked thousands of comments on the official PlayStation fan page on Facebook, some of them from users who said they would switch to Microsoft's Xbox Live games network.
Sony said it would offer some free content, including 30 days of free membership to a premium service to existing users and in some regions pay credit card renewal fees.
It said compensation would only be paid if users suffered damage. Sony did not elaborate except to say there was no evidence that credit card details had actually been stolen. It has confirmed the theft of names and addresses.
Since the breach, security has been boosted on Sony's computer systems, the company said, adding that enhanced levels of data protection and encryption would be implemented.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation had been asked to probe the breach, Sony said.
Reuters