As many people know, Sony's PlayStation 3 Home Beta launched version 1.03 as an open beta to the entire PlayStation network on December 11, 2008. Yesterday, it had 6 hours of down time for the update from v1.03 to v1.04. This was in reaction to issues with an on and off ability to log in, occasional game log outs, extreme lag in rooms with many voice enabled players, and an abuse reporting system which kicked you from the network. Six hours is an unacceptable downtime in the modern internet community and can mean millions of dollars lost.

The reported reason for the significant problems with this new service is the high demand for the service. Apparently, many of the issues are being caused by the high bandwidth of the voice-chat system. This is clearly an issue of unexpected population scaling. The servers were apparently not tested to withstand the load of the entire PlayStation Network user community. In my opinion, this is bad business practice. It is only natural for any semi-frequent user to at least wish to try the free and highly touted new world offered by Sony.

The immature preparation of the network for scaling populations and high-bandwidth services is pulling Sony's resources from creating the 'new' to fixing the 'old'. Bad product releases can sour the user community and fail a product launch. I suppose we can release anything with a "Beta" tag to the entire community and be resolved from its shortcomings. This product was not properly tested for scale by its developers. Instead, it was tested on its users.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2337240,00.asp
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=26688458