Tongues are, as you’d expect, wagging. Every social network on the internet is asking what’s up with the PlayStation Network, and the silence from camp Sony is, figuratively, deafening.

Nobody outside of the adamantine walls (lined as they are with the glistening carcasses of PSPgo consoles) is saying very much, and people are getting annoyed, anxious, worried – some have even switched allegiance and splashed out on a 360. Or so they say.

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So, what’s going on? Well, naturally, we don’t know either, but we’ve been watching the web over the last day or so and have collated what seem to be the three most popular ideas and thoughts.

The network has been DDoS’d – this, a concentrated traffic assault, doesn’t seem likely. The PSN immediately tells you the thing is off ‘for maintenance’ and so suggests that, from a layman’s perceptive sure, that the actual network is bobbing along nicely. It is, apparently, just the actual sign-in authentication process that’s currently offline, something echoed by the fact that pre-started downloads continue to zip by in the background.

Besides, Anon have already said this isn’t anything to do with them.

The PSN has been hacked – this seems more likely, but hopefully not what’s going on. If customer details were compromised Sony would surely have said by now, it has been a few days – at least that’s our hope. Other thoughts related include Trophies being reset and download counts being wiped – massively unlikely – we’re pretty sure Sony knows what they’re doing in terms of backups.

Hackers found a way to get free games on the Store – this holds a bit of weight as the most likely. Despite having access to a debug PS3, this one’s new to us, but we’ve heard on Twitter and a few forums that you can grant PSN credit so that testers and so on can grab games without handing over real money, on the development version of the network.

The PSN on debug machines doesn’t require any sort of fund transaction, fake or otherwise, but according to a post on NeoGAF, it might be something to do with authenticating licences for full game packages (which can be downloaded). This authentication system may have been compromised over the last week or so, and Sony have locked off the PSN to get this fixed, especially if the methods have become public.

Some people on Twitter are asking whether payment card details have been compromised, without answer.

The truth is we don’t know what’s going on, and only a very select few do. Whilst Sony are battling to get it fixed (they are, of course, despite the moans: anyone that thinks otherwise has no idea about shares, shareholders and revenue, not to mention public opinion) public updates are few and far between, causing tension and a sense of the unknown.

It’s annoying, yes, but what can we do?