Since Friday evening, Sony’s PlayStation Network has been down. At 15 hours and counting, PSN is experiencing one of the longest unscheduled outages of a major video game network. The outage is wide-reaching, including PSN’s account management, social features, the PlayStation Store, and more.
Yet information on the cause (let alone the fix) remains vague. Fifteen hours ago, 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.” The account hasn’t posted a message since then.
The PSN store outage can be monitored on Sony’s PSN status page. At the time of publishing this story, all features are marked as down. Downdetector also provides real-time status based on user reports. As the day goes on and more PlayStation owners attempt to sign on to their accounts, user-submitted outage reports are increasing, having peaked at just under 70,000 reports last night.
Would-be players have 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.
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. All eyes are on Sony for an update.
