According to Sony, the shutdown of the PlayStation Network will cost the company an estimated $171 Million. The word comes by way of a revised earnings statement Sony issued in advance of their Thursday earnings report.

According to the company, the breakdown of PSN Network Outage expenses is as follows:

• The current estimated cost of the personal information theft protection program for customers. "This program includes a set amount of insurance to cover a certain amount of identity theft losses that may be incurred by our customers in certain regions within a set period with respect to misuse of their personal information."
• Costs of welcome back programs that offer customers certain services (such as games, music and videos) for free
• Customer support costs
• Network security enhancement costs
• Legal and expert costs
• The impact on our profits due to a possible future revenue decrease.

There could be more costs associated with the outage, of course. As Sony itself says, laying out the possibility of losses from lawsuits, and, if it turns out people's credit card numbers were stolen, and used, that could cost Sony as well. Here's how the company laid it out:

"These amounts are our reasonable assumption based on the information currently available to Sony. So far, we have not received any confirmed reports of customer identity theft issues, nor confirmed any misuse of credit cards from the cyber-attack. Those are key variables, and if that changes, the costs could change. In addition, in connection with the data breach, class action lawsuits have been filed against Sony and certain of its subsidiaries and regulatory inquiries have begun; however, those are all at a preliminary stage, so we are not able to include the possible outcome of any of them in our results forecast for the fiscal year ending March 2012 at this moment."

Source: Sony