011 PSN hack. Image via WikimediaImages on Pixabay I remember where I was. It was my senior year in college, and I was working diligently on my thesis while still attending classes.

My thesis was a Call of Duty feature where I interviewed people and wrote about the game's future, so gaming was actually pretty important when it came to my academic career at the time. But most importantly, April 20, 2011, was the day after Mortal Kombat 9 released, and I couldn't play the damn game online anymore. I was livid.

My PS3 felt neutered. I was so excited to enjoy the new fighting game that brought the series back to its roots, and I couldn't bring my Raiden or Reptile into the online arena anymore. I couldn't even play Black Ops 1, which was crucial to my writing work at the time.

This feeling went on for weeks. WEEKS. 24 days, to be exact, is how long PSN was offline. That seems unimaginable now, and trust me, it was back then, too.

The hack that forced Sony to bring everything down exposed information like usernames, physical addresses, email addresses, dates of birth, passwords, and financial details, so it was a big deal. It was made an even bigger deal by the fact that Sony did not announce right away that there was an external breach to warn users that their info may have been compromised. PSN went down on April 20 after the hack apparently took place from April 17 to 19, but the company didn't make mention of any breach until April 22.

"There’s a difference in timing between when we identified there was an intrusion and when we learned of consumers’ data being compromised," Sony said on April 26. "We learned there was an intrusion April 19th and subsequently shut the services down. We then brought in outside experts to help us learn how the intrusion occurred and to conduct an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the incident.

It was necessary to conduct several days of forensic analysis, and it took our experts until yesterday to understand the scope of the breach. We then shared that information with our consumers and announced it publicly this afternoon." Image via PlayStation For those of us old or aware enough to remember, this was a pretty wild time in the gaming community.

Many were freaking out that their info had been stolen, while Xbox players were gloating about the fact that they could still play online during the once-rampant fanboy wars. Sony soon announced "compensation" for users who were affected, which included the choice of two PS3 games and two PSP games from a predetermined list, along with 30 days of free PS Plus. I chose Wipeout HD/Fury and LittleBigPlanet, because I owned the other options (InFamous, Dead Nation, and Super Stardust HD).

Hey, a couple free games were quite alright by me. Later that year, Sony announced that there was "no confirmed evidence any credit card or personal information" was being "misused." So, when the dust cleared, the outage for me just meant a long time without online gaming, which gave me a good chance to finish Mortal Kombat's story mode and practice a lot against the CPU. Are you old enough to remember the great PSN hack of 2011, or do you live without back pain?