The PlayStation Network has been back up and running for a bit now, after a major outage took PlayStation 5 and PS4’s online features offline for roughly 24 hours at the end of last week. To make up for the extended downtime, Sony is offering every paying PS Plus member a small but free extension of their existing subscription.
“We apologize for the inconvenience and thank the community for their patience,” Sony posted on X on February 9, the morning after PSN came back online. “All PlayStation Plus members will automatically receive an additional 5 days of service.” It appears this make-good should be added directly to players’ accounts and push back their renewal dates by nearly a week.
It’s a nice little gesture but it still doesn’t address why PSN suffered one of the longest outages in the service’s history over the weekend. The pervasiveness of the problems, across multiple continents and PSN features like accounts and the PlayStation Store, seemed to point to some sort of significant malfunction.
Why was PSN down for 24 hours?
Sony’s explanation for what happened is strangely brief and vague. “Network services have fully recovered from an operational issue,” the company posted on February 9. There was no further detail about what that operational issue was or whether it might pop back up at some point.
Sony’s description of the issues prior to solving them was similarly limited. “We are aware some users might be currently experiencing issues with PSN,” is all the company wrote for the 24 hours that PSN was down, as thousands of players aired their frustrations and demanded more information across social media and Reddit. Imagine Netflix being down for an entire day with an explanation that basically amounted to, “Well that was weird, but hey we’re back!”
Because the duration of the interrupted service recalled the infamous PSN outage of 2011 which arose from a malicious hack, some fans were worried that something similar might have happened this time as well, even taking the step of preemptively changing their PSN login information in case their accounts had been compromised. Fortunately, that doesn’t appear to have been the case this time around. Hopefully, the outage remains a blip and PlayStation Network service continues without future problems.
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