Finally, after most of a day in the dark, PlayStation Network is back. An outage starting Friday evening took out the online multiplayer gaming part of PSN, as well as the store and other features requiring internet connectivity.
Reports started coming in on February 7 that showed the connection problems, with players taking to social media to note they couldn’t connect to PSN. Sony confirmed the outage eventually, though the company said very little about it during its downtime. For most of Saturday, the network was down. As the afternoon drew to a close, though, services began slowly being restored. By evening, Sony’s PSN Service Status page indicated everything was up once more.
The official AskPlayStation Twitter account acknowledged the disruption, apologizing for the inconvenience and assuring players that they should now be able to access online features as usual.
Players Frustrated by Lack of Communication
Although the issue has now been resolved, many gamers took to the Internet to express frustration with how Sony communicated the problem. Beyond an initial confirmation that PSN was down, there were few updates throughout the day about when services might return.
For single-player gamers, the outage was more of an inconvenience than a major problem. However, those who mainly play online multiplayer games were completely locked out. For some, the timing of the outage couldn’t have been worse, with major in-game events coinciding with the outage, including a Call of Duty Double XP weekend, Monster Hunter Wilds’ second open beta, and the launch of Destiny 2’s new Sundered Doctrine dungeon.
With PlayStation Network now back online, gamers can dive back into their favorite games, though the downtime might have caused some to miss key events in their titles of choice. Whether any developers will extend their promotions in response to this situation remains to be seen.
While outages do happen, many are hoping that Sony will do better next time, because on a network the size of the PSN, being left in the dark for almost 24 hours is not something players take lightly.
