At Sony's E3 press conference this Monday, SCEA President and CEO Jack Tretton openly apologized for the recent outages in the company’s PlayStation Network service, telling consumers, “we apologize for any anxiety we may have caused you.” “This isn’t the first time I’ve come on stage like this with an elephant in the room,” Tretton said as he walked out on stage. Sony also noted that last week’s hardware sales numbers were up by 27 percent, and that the service’s network activity levels are now at 90 percent of what they were when the service first went offline. Tretton made sure to apologize to retail partners, developers, and publishers, reassuring them of the strength of the PlayStation brand.