Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) went down on Friday evening, leaving tens of thousands of gamers locked out of online services for over 24 hours.
Reports of connection failures and login errors flooded social media, with around 71,000 users reporting issues on PlayStation’s official website.
Popular online games like Fortnite, Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto were completely unplayable with some players unable to access even their offline titles due to license verification issues.
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The timing couldn't have been worse either as it was a weekend of promotional in-game events including a double XP weekend for COD Black Ops 6.
The developers released a brief statement through their AskPlayStation account on X (formerly Twitter), writing: "We are aware some users might be currently experiencing issues with PSN".
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Sony later announced that the network had now 'fully recovered' and apologised for the disruption, but did not explain what caused the outage.
As compensation, Sony informed that all PlayStation Plus members would automatically receive 'an additional 5 days of service.' Meaning that if your monthly or yearly subscription was set to expire, you'd get five extra days.
But that hasn't sat well with many players especially as those who don't have PS Plus will receive no compensation at all.
However, many players have been left outraged by the total lack of transparency throughout the outage and fair compensation to its loyal customers.
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“Unacceptable lack of communication. We pay for your services," the top comment read. "Many people make plans to play together on the weekend. You have allowed a disruption in services we pay for and plan for, without communication with us about what is happening. Reimbursement would be the thing to do.”
Some users believe a refund is in order with one replying: “Like this if PlayStation should give everyone a free year of PS+ due to their lack of communication and care for the community."
Someone else argued: "Yeah, been down since 6pm, so 5 hours now… sucks I CAN’T PLAY ANY OFFLINE GAMES I OWN cuz my PS5 can’t verify I own it EVERY TIME I LOG IN instead of, you know, just SAVING THAT INFO TO THE SYSTEM. Sure would make this down time an almost non-issue.”
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Meanwhile, one PS player told the BBC: "Paying a monthly fee for their service is one thing but not being able to play games that we've purchased is something that's beyond frustrating."
This time marks the second longest outage in PlayStation’s history, beaten only by the 2011 outage that lasted almost an entire month.
While this was not as long as the 2011 outage, it marks the second-longest downtime in PSN history. Back then, players received free games such as Burnout Paradise as compensation but that was weeks of downtime, not a day.
Again, a 24-hour outage is pretty rare in the gaming industry leading many users to presume it was a hack. And Sony's silence has done little to reassure the community.