North American PlayStation Network customers will get free game downloads and video rentals as a "welcome back" following a massive outage and data breach caused by a cyber attack.

The company said network members will be able to download two PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Portable games for free from a select list during the 30 days after the PlayStation Store comes back online.

Sony began restoring services to its Playstation Network on Sunday after nearly 3 weeks offline. Sony’s PlayStation Network was nearly 100 percent operational on Monday after weeks of downtime, but the restoration was not without its own problems.

By Monday services were restored across all of the United States and most of the rest of the world with Japan being the glaring exception.

Japanese representatives refused to let the company fire up its network there until it could prove that it had adequate security in place.

Media and Content Industry department at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, demanded two things.

"The first is preventative measures. As of May 13, Sony was incomplete in exercising measures that they said they will do on the May 1 press conference," Kazushige Nobutani, the ministry director said.

The second was in how Sony hoped to regain consumer confidence over personal data such as credit card information.

Aside from problems at home, Sony also faced hurdles getting the network back up in the rest of the world.  The Japanese based company said late Saturday that services would be back up on Sunday following a region-by-region roll out. But servers crashed during the process and users quickly took to Twitter.

"The PSN was back for like an hour, and now it's gone. How does that work," wondered Twitter user sebsub2272.

Representatives from Sony were quick to respond, asking customers to remain patient as they facing an unprecedented amount of demand.

"Please bear with us as we continue working on the PSN restoration. We are experiencing extremely heavy traffic," Sony said across its PlayStation EU twitter feed.

The hiccups were the latest hurdle that Sony is facing as it attempts to get its beleaguered PlayStation Network back online, but they pale in comparison to the complete blackout of the last 2 weeks.

Saturday night Sony No. 2 Kazuo Hirai offered his "sincere" apologies to customs that have been without service, and explained t hat a number of security measures needed to be installed after last month's devastating hacker attack.

"While we understand the importance of getting our services back online, we did not rush to do so at the expense of extensively and aggressively testing our enhanced security measures," Hirai said.

The executive explained that Sony had put in place upgraded systems including”advanced security technology," increased levels of encryption, firewall and early warning system.

The company would start bringing back its gaming network this Sunday, on a country-by-country basis, and expects it to be completed by May 31.

Among the 100 million user accounts, Sony said about 92 million can access the limited PlayStation network service.

Respect...

"tyrtl"