As you’ve heard by now, the PlayStation Network is down, or mostly down, and has been for close to 24 hours at this point. Reports at Down Detector peaked Friday evening around 6pm ET, but users continue to log outages Saturday and Sony’s PlayStation Status website still shows red across all services. Some users report service coming back online while others say it’s spotty at best, flickering in and out.
It’s unclear what caused the outage or how long it will take for all services to come back online for every region. The lack of clarity is largely thanks to Sony’s near-total lack of communication during the outage. Obviously, this has made a lot of PlayStation gamers upset, with many demanding free games or a credit for lost time. Of course, server outages happen and sometimes a fix takes time. It can take hours or even days for something like this to finally get resolved.
The problem isn’t that PSN servers are down. The problem is that Sony has failed to post any meaningful updates in the course of a full day of server outages. There is one lonely tweet on the company’s Ask PlayStation Twitter/X account which reads: “We are aware some users might be currently experiencing issues with PSN.” It links to the PlayStation Status page.
This is . . . not very useful, to say the least. There is no information on what the cause of the server outage is, nor any indication about when it might be fixed. Sony hasn’t even bothered to include any reassurances. A simple “We are working diligently to restore services! Thank you so much for your patience!” would go a long ways, as would regular updates on social media, reddit and to the press. I’ve reached out to Sony for more information and will update this post if and when I hear more.
In fact, not only has the Ask PlayStation account not posted any updates about the outage since Friday evening, Saturday afternoon they posted this tweet:
Seriously? In the middle of a massive PSN server outage, you’re posting about SSDs? The replies are . . . not kind.
Sony’s approach here isn’t just unhelpful, it also minimizes the issue by saying “some users” are “experiencing issues” rather than acknowledging that a huge chunk of the PlayStation community is currently without access to their games because of a server outage, which is not “experiencing issues”. This type of safe corporate-speak just annoys people and gamers are a particularly prickly bunch.
Meanwhile, the free beta for Monster Hunter Wild is ongoing as is the Free Weekend for Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6, which is also running a 2XP weekend event.
The lack of communication from Sony is frustrating for other reasons. If this was a security breach, for instance, some kind of hack, then players who may have credit card data linked to their systems should be informed. We have to guess whether are account information is safe. Even without communication, the fact that so many single-player games require PSN in order to run should be troubling in and of itself. Losing access to single-player content because of a server outage is, quite frankly, outrageous. It’s the kind of thing gamers used to rail against but has been relentlessly foisted on consumers over the years.
In any case, it appears that the PSN is slowly coming back online, but whether you’ll be able to login anytime soon in your region remains a mystery. I’ll post an update if anything changes or Sony decides to share some new information. Any information at all.
