Sony’s response to PlayStation Network outage

Sony’s PlayStation Network was down from Friday to Saturday evening. Surpassing 24 hours, it was one of the decade’s longest unscheduled outages of a major video game network. The outage was wide-reaching, including PSN’s account management, social features, the PlayStation Store, and more. Yet as the service returned online, information on the cause (let alone the fix) remained vague. Late Saturday night, a Sony Interactive Entertainment spokesperson responded to Polygon’s request for comment with the following statement: “Network services are fully recovered from an operational issue. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank the community for their patience. All PlayStation Plus members will automatically receive an additional 5 days of service.” The statement builds upon the company’s slight, blunt initial update from Friday. Shortly after the outage began, the official AskPlaystation X account messaged, “We are aware some users might be currently experiencing issues with PSN. For more details: https://status.playstation.com.” [Media: https://twitter.com/AskPlayStation/status/1888041723831484682] At 3:00 p.m. ET on Saturday, the X account posted a message promoting M.2 SSD expansion for the PS5 — presumably scheduled to publish this weekend. Otherwise, the account has been silent. At 6:50 p.m. ET, Sony had yet to provide additional clarity — causing concern for some PlayStation owners who remember the infamous Sony Pictures hack in 2014. On BlueSky, The Verge’s Tom Warren wondered — in the absence of comment from Sony — if a DDoS attack could be to blame. PSN outages can be monitored on Sony’s PSN status page. At the time of publishing this story, all features are marked as online. Downdetector also provides real-time status based on user reports. User-submitted outage reports peaked at just under 70,000 reports last night. Would-be players shared their frustrations across the web, with comment counts well into the thousands or even tens of thousands, as seen on this Reddit thread, where “PlayStation network down” remains a top trending topic for the day. [Media: https://www.reddit.com/r/playstation/comments/1ik9y9g/everyone_going_to_this_sub_to_check_if_the/] It’s not just the gaming-focused parts of the web that have noticed; mainstream publications from NBC News to the BBC to even the Associated Press have published stories on the unusually long outage. An outage last October lasted roughly eight hours, while a partial outage in May lasted for less than five hours. Of course, this all pales in comparison to 2011’s 23-day outage (!) which was memorable enough to earn itself a 3,000-word Wikipedia entry detailing the calamity. While that outage was famously the result of a hack, one that exposed personal data for some 77 million PSN accounts, subsequent outages have been more anodyne in nature with little in the way of explanation short of sharing that services have been restored. Update 1 (1:00 p.m. ET): Added coverage of the PSN outage from mainstream publications. Update 2 (2:30 p.m. ET): Noted the latest message message from the official X account. Update 3 (6:50 p.m. ET): The story and headline have been updated to note the PlayStation Network is back online. Update 4 (2:00 a.m. ET): The story has been updated with comment from PlayStation PR.