PSN restart blocked in Japan

Sony finally brought the PlayStation Network back online over the weekend, and there was much rejoicing. The restoration swept across North America and Europe, but Sony's home country of Japan will have to wait a bit longer.

Nikkei (via Edge) reports that the company has been restricted from restoring the service until it shows more information on its new security measures to a Japanese regulatory agency.

"We met with Sony on May 6 and 13, and basically want two things from them," said Kazushige Nobutani, director of the Media and Content Industry department at the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. "The first is preventive measures. As of May 13, Sony was incomplete in exercising measures that they said they will do on the May 1 press conference." The second point regards how Sony plans to regain consumer confidence.

"There were similar cases in the past that were caused by other firms, and we are asking Sony whether their measures are good enough when compared to countermeasures taken in the past," he said.

So far the restoration in other areas has gone smoothly, besides a brief outage due to an "extremely heavy load of password resets."