After a long period of downtime, Sony has announced that it will start restoring its PlayStation Network in some Asian countries on Saturday. The company recently restored the network, which had been incapacitated by a series of hacker attacks for nearly a month, in most parts of the world. But users have still been waiting for PSN to get back online in Asia. That’s about to change — for some countries, at least.

According to a statement from the company, it will first restore online gaming and chat in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand on Saturday.

PSN will remain down in South Korea and Hong Kong until further notice. The restoration of PSN was delayed in Asia, as authorities in some countries had asked Sony to prove it had taken security measures to protect the customers’ data. Sony is also offering a “Welcome Back” gift package to users in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, similar to gift packages offered in other parts of the world. As Sony slowly cleans this mess, the cost of the PSN hack and the resulting downtime has built up: Sony directly lost $171 million due to the incident. The damage to its reputation, as well as the loss of users’ trust, might end up hurting Sony even more. More About: asia, Gaming, online, playstation network, PSN, sony

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Sony Set To Bring PSN Back Online in Asia