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TechRadar

Matt Bolton

PSN was down, and some are still having trouble — here's what we know about this weekend's outage

PSN PlayStation Downdetector Sony Reddit DownDetectorcom United States

If PSN was down for you, it wasn't just you. The official PlayStation Status page confirmed that "Some services are experiencing issues" — and specifically, the services in question were "Gaming & Social". The Status page now says all services are online, and I've been able to get back to gaming in Overwatch 2, but not everyone was so lucky. Loads of people were still locked out from playing games online, though things now seem to be fully settling down.

PlayStation hasn't said anything official beyond the Status page, but one of our users (thanks, Idra) says they spoke to Sony support, who said: “We don't have a set timeframe for when the problem will be 100% resolved; we simply ask for your patience. Thank you.”

Downdetector's US reports were dropping for PSN access, then settled pretty steadily at a medium level of disruption, but then dropped rapidly after a few hours to nearly nothing. As Japan came online, reports there spiked and lots of people posted that they couldn't get online, but those reports also dropped rapidly after a while.

Bored by the outage? Try our Astro Bot PlayStation 30th Anniversary image puzzle below. It's not CoD, but it's something…

Hello folks, I'm looking out for status info on what's happening on PSN, and will update this page as I find info!

What's out? Officially, all of these

Here's Sony's list of what's officially down — you can see that Sony officially recognized it around 40 minutes ago, but reports online first surface around an hour ago. And to be fair, by Big Tech standards, acknowledging a problem after 20-30 minutes isn't too bad at all.

It's noticed elsewhere

You can see that people aren't just noting that PSN is down on Downdetector, but it's hard to whether these are connected — the reports may be just the ripples of PSN being down, as specific games or services get flagged as not working as a result.

You can also see that the spike is dropping, though there's no status update from Sony and I'm not playing Overwatch 2 yet…

Still the official line

"You might have difficulty launching games, apps or network features. We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience."

So what can you do?

Well, I'm accessing the PlayStation Store right now, and browsing the Spring Sale. I seem to be able to download Slime Rancher 2 from PS Plus' Monthly Games perfectly well. I just started playing The Long Dark, which I had downloaded but never actually fired up before, so that's fine.

What do you mean 'Offline'?

Now, I do notice that my 'Online status' is offline, and it really doesn't want to let me select the option and do anything with it, despite the fact that I am clearly online and downloading a game. Slime Rancher is at 70%.

Downloads work!

So, I've been able to add Slime Rancher 2 to my library, download it, and start playing successfully it all during this PSN outage — which is a drastic improvement on previous PSN outages, where often people couldn't fire up games they'd already downloaded, let along play online or download and start new games.

It's back… maybe

People are saying that PSN is back, and I can confirm that I'm now able to log back into Overwatch 2.

As you'd imagine, gamers were getting a little frustrated at the outage.

On Reddit, there's a 300-plus comment PSN outage megathread, with many posters complaining about the modern nature of online-only games.

"What makes it worse is how random it feels. You can sit down ready to play, and out of nowhere you’re getting connection errors with no warning and no clear idea when it’ll be fixed. It just kills the whole vibe, especially if you only had a little time to play," says one user, Used_Debt_9763.

Another, SillyWillySaxon, says, "Outage has made me realise just how many games are an online service. I can’t access career mode on something as simple as EA Sports PGA Tour. I feel so vulnerable with most of my games being digitally downloaded 😓"

Let's hope that the PSN's return in the last few minutes holds up — not all recoveries from outages go smoothly, after all…

Online, but not officially

Sony still hasn't updated the PlayStation Status site to say that it's back officially. I am, as you can see, back Online though.

I can see my Trophies again! I don't really care about Trophies these days — long gone is my Xbox 360 Achievement-hunting era — but given that 20 minutes ago I couldn't see them, it's a welcome improvement.

Seems like it's still lucky for some but not others

This is of course far from the first PSN outage — and it's a long way off being the biggest. Well, unless it goes on for a lot longer…

Last February, the service was down for more than 24 hours, due to what Sony eventually said was an "operational issue" with network services.

On that occasion, the company came in for a huge amount of flak for its lack of announcements about what was happening. At the time of writing, there's been no note on X/Twitter about this one, either.

That previous outage eventually saw Sony give all affected PlayStation Plus members an additional five days of service free of charge as compensation.

I'd be very surprised if there was any similar handout today, given that the outage hasn't lasted for long and appears to be coming to an end. But we'll keep our eyes on what's happening in case it's not fully over yet.

It's officially back

Sony's Status page has been updated. All green.

I'm back on and getting annoyed with my DPSes in Overwatch 2, all is well.

Hmmm… is it really over?

It certainly sounds like some people are struggling to get online still, and aren't happy about the all-green declaration on the Status page…

It's also worth nothing that on Downdetector.com there has been a bit of a rise in reports after the big drops during the recovery…

Overwatch 2 has been working fine for me, at least. Got walked all over once, nailed it once. About par for me. Obviously the problem in the first game was my team…

The Downdetector.com graph is back to dropping, after a brief pause, though commenters are in various states of disruption.

"All my stuff is loading it shows my friends it's says I'm online but fun cod won't work," says 'Jirdoon'.

"still cant get in but their site says everything's up wth," says 'jsafkerjr44'.

"imma make a digiorno pizza in the meantime," says 'mario', wisely.

"I can stream games or play fortnite ok but I can't play online ps plus games or games like call of duty online," says John Burrows in our own comments section here.

Still plenty of people saying it's down for them, sadly.

The most recent post on X from PlayStation is inviting you to play Fortnite to get new skins — I just hope you're actually able to get online to do it…

The end of Downdetector's graph has gone from consistently falling (for the second time) to rising again (for the second time)…

Here is a fresh image of the PlayStation Status page…

…but here is fresh commentary from Reddit…

There are lots of comments from people on Downdetector from people identifying where they're from that's still down — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Ontario, and so on — but location doesn't seem to be the trigger, as this Reddit comment from someone with two consoles in one house makes particularly clear:

I saw a post floating around on X that I won't link to because I don't think it's accurate, promising that if you're having trouble getting online, you can fix it with a software update. The reason I don't think it's accurate is that my PS5 isn't up do date, and I'm now back online!

I'm on software 26.01-12.70.00.01 — and my machine is telling me there's an update available. I'm not touching that, in case updating actually breaks things for me, since I'm one of the ones lucky enough to be back online.

And, incidentally, I'm based in the UK and so is this person, so I really don't think the difference between being on and offline is location-based.

As noted by a Mod in the Reddit megathread, the best advice seems to be to keep trying, unfortunately — there's still no official further word from PlayStation on why some people might be having issues, while someone else in literally the same house as them might not be.

It's possible they're ramping the system back up slowly and not allowing access for everyone — though most online Status pages would call that 'recovering' or something like that, but PlayStation continues to say everything is fully hunky-dory.

Another sign that it's not about location: commenter 'Kira' on Downdetector says "Finally servers up in Texas!" — answered immediately by cries of "false" and "Lie. Ignore this guy."

Speaking of Downdetector, that graph continues to stay steady — a pretty significant percentage of people seem to still be locked out, for whatever reason.

I'm noticing that X is particularly filling up with Japanese users who are presumably just waking up on a Sunday ready for gaming, and are finding that they're locked out. And as one message notes below, the Status page says everything's fine — they slept through the part where it was 'officially' down…

Dan Shepherd, in the comments on this article, says that checking for an update on the console and applying it worked to get back online. I mentioned earlier that I was skeptical of this being a fix because I'm online and yet my console says I need to apply the latest update — but hey, if it worked for Dan, maybe it'll work for you.

And please add to the comments here if it does work!

You can tell Japan is just coming online to find that many people there can't actually get online (on PSN) — here's the Japan-specific graph for PSN on Downdetector, spiking hugely right now…

Oh, I did check, the Japanese PlayStation Status page says the same as the US version: all systems go.

X continues to fill with posts from Japanese people who can't get online and have no idea why, though…

Just received this ad on Reddit. Read the room, guys.

Idra in our comments says that the updating trick didn't work for them, but even more notable is they said they spoke to PlayStation Support and received this quote:

“We don't have a set timeframe for when the problem will be 100% resolved; we simply ask for your patience. Thank you.”

Another vote from someone on Reddit who found that the update didn't help them:

I agree with this message about the system status! Pick a struggle!

The average response in Japan is chiller than the average response elsewhere, I will say.

I strongly suspect that tips like this are placebos — my guess is that this person just happened to get back in after trying this, rather than these actions being the cause of why they're back in. But I'll share it with you out of interest:

I've added a little puzzle game to the top of this page, since if you're here I assume you can't play the game you really want to play. It's a puzzle of an Astro Bot image for PlayStation's 30th anniversary, to help you remember the good times.

Okay, I'm seeing a HUGE fall in reports on Downdetector in both the US and Japan. Our pal Idris in the comments here, who spoke to Sony support before, is back online. And I can see in our dashboard that the number of you viewing this report live has dropped dramatically in a short time. So I'm thinking we're getting back online properly this time…

Okay folks, all the outage graphs continue to fall. I suspect a few people will still have hiccups for a while, but it looks like the recovery is nearly complete. It's late into the night where I am, so I'm going to log off, and I hope that you're all back online and having all the fun in the world for the rest of your day, wherever you are.

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