(Image courtesy of Forbes. “Sony’s PlayStation Network, the backbone of the PlayStation family’s online service, experienced a two-day outage.”)
Aaron Preziosi
Connector Editor
Last weekend, PlayStation users experienced an unprecedented outage as Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) went down for over 24 hours. Players were unable to sign into their accounts, browse the PlayStation store, or even play the games they “owned” through PlayStation Plus, Sony’s subscription service which granted them online multiplayer, game offers, and discounts on select titles. According to player reports, connection issues began around 6 p.m. on Feb. 7, and only got worse into the night. At 8:45 p.m., the official Ask PlayStation X account posted, “We are aware some users might currently be experiencing issues with PSN.” However, “some” users may have been an understatement as player reports seem to reflect all users experiencing issues.
This has been the largest PSN outage in over a decade, following 2011’s colossal 23-day outage. However, 2011’s incident was a result of an “external intrusion,” some kind of bad actor attacking the network. As a result, Sony was forced to bring the entire service offline for nearly a month and users had to act in order to protect their account details, which had become compromised. It is unknown at this time whether last weekend’s outage was due to another malicious attack, or something else. Through the same Ask PlayStation account, Sony claims the problem was an “operational issue” and is providing PlayStation Plus subscribers with an additional five days of PlayStation Plus for free, following PSN’s restoration on Feb. 9.
Regardless of the compensation and restoration of service, players are upset over the whole ordeal and are questioning the state of modern gaming. Because a vast majority of titles are published and distributed digitally, this means that players don’t really “own” the games they buy anymore, only licenses. Because of this, their consoles have to check with a network if they are permitted to play. In the case of an outage, this causes players to be locked out of games which they have purchased and are rightfully theirs to play, even impacting singleplayer games with little-to-no multiplayer or network features.
As a result, many players are questioning whether the industry’s recent pivot to live-service titles (games which are always played online, usually multiplayer, and are often focused on keeping players in the game for as long as possible so they buy DLC, microtransactions, cosmetics, etc.) was a good idea, as well as what really happened to the network. X user carlitoswayec said “Thank you for the 5 days, but, I think it should be a top priority to communicate with your users better. We are, after all, PAYING customers, and we deserve to know what caused this outage and much better communication when these things happen.” Mirroring the sentiment of spotty communication, X user MNav4gator also said “Can you provide details on what caused the PlayStation Network issue? Please explain why it was down for so long.😕” In a more sarcastic tone, another X user, JohnJohn722 said “Sucks to hear that it was ‘Operational Issue.’ I can only imagine the stress if I were to encounter ‘Operational Issue’ on the streets or in the supermarket. What steps have you taken to ensure we can avoid “Operational Issue” in the future?”
Sony has yet to respond to the overall negative sentiment regarding their response.
