The PlayStation Network has been experiencing significant service interruptions since Friday evening, impacting multiple aspects of the platform’s functionality.
Sony’s PSN status page indicated widespread issues affecting account management, gaming and social features, PlayStation Video, PlayStation Store, and the PlayStation Direct website.
The disruption impacted both online multiplayer games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto and Marvel Rivals, as well as offline single-player games due to license verification problems.
PlayStation acknowledged the situation on their support webpage, stating they were aware of the issues and actively working on a resolution.
The service monitoring platform DownDetector recorded the start of the outage just before midnight on Friday, with reports from over 71,000 affected users.
Social media platforms saw an influx of complaints from users worldwide, with many continuing to report ongoing access problems.
One affected user, Jeff Thigpen, 48, from Dallas, described his experience to the BBC after being unable to access PSN for 10 hours: “At my job, I have an hourly rotation and during my break, I’ll occasionally get on my PlayStation Portal. Tonight I tried and was unable to play any of the games I purchased. 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.”
Connor Clarke, who runs the Sheffield Games Collective, highlighted the particularly unfortunate timing of the outage: “This is doubly frustrating because it’s an eventful weekend for the game-sphere. There is a free beta for a hotly anticipated new game called Monster Hunter Wild, and also a double XP weekend in Call of Duty Black Ops 6. I imagine there are thousands – if not millions – of gamers worldwide and in the UK that are quite frustrated that they are unable to play at the moment.”
Clarke noted that while service interruptions typically last only a few hours, this outage has persisted for over 12 hours, adding: “It’s very frustrating. I’m unable to play multi-player and more frustratingly, I’m unable to play any of my downloaded single-player games because PlayStation says it is unable to verify my licenses.”