PlayStation Network has been offline for the last few hours, leaving many gamers without access to their games, Party Chat, or other services. Sony is investigating.
According to Sony’s official PlayStation Network server status page, the PSN service is experiencing numerous issues across the board, and has been for the last few hours. Beginning earlier this afternoon, PlayStation 4 owners began noticing trouble signing into their accounts on their consoles, and took to social media to seek out help. It turns out it isn’t just sign-in issues gamers are having.Confusion was high for a while with PlayStation’s own status page claiming everything was fine, but that updated quickly with the page showing login issues on PSN. Shortly after that, the PSN status page showed multiple services offline, including the PlayStation Store and gaming services.
At the time of this writing, it looks like PlayStation Store, Account Management, and Friends List are all back up and working, but the core services of gaming and Party Chat are still offline, meaning there’s very little PlayStation 4 owners can do with their consoles at the moment.
Naturally, Sony is hard at work trying to restore all PSN services for gamers, though there doesn’t seem to be much communication from the gaming giant about the situation. Aside from the original tweets on the PlayStation Twitter accounts acknowledging the issue, there haven’t been any official updates. Granted, the PlayStation Network status page looks to be up to date, but provides very little information for PSN members about the cause of the problem or a timeline for when it should be fixed.
Sony is no stranger to technical issues with its PlayStation Network. The service has been targeted multiple times by various entities by both DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks and hacks to the system. Over the last five years, PlayStation Network has had to deal with numerous attacks, some lasting a few hours, others a few days. In 2011, the service experienced a security breach so widespread it caused the network to stay offline for a whopping 23 days. Earlier this month, multiple games experienced issues on PlayStation 4, including Neverwinter, FIFA 17, and the Battlefield 1 beta.
Hopefully the current situation – whether it be an attack or other type of technical issue – will resolve quickly. Gamers will undoubtedly be keeping an eye on the PlayStation Network status page to see when gaming, Party Chat, and other services come back online.
What do you think about the current PlayStation Network outage? Are you experiencing any issues? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.