Meghan Owen & Jacqueline Howard
BBC News
The PlayStation Network is now back online, the service has said, after it experienced a multi-hour outage that began on Friday evening.
PlayStation said the network had now “fully recovered” and apologised for the disruption, but did not disclose what caused the problem.
The outage rendered the online aspects of games such as Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto and Marvel Rivals inaccessible, and caused issues with license verification of offline single-player games.
According to DownDetector, the problem began just before midnight on Friday night.
In a message on X, PlayStation said: “Network services have fully recovered from an operational issue. We apologise for the inconvenience and thank the community for their patience.
“All PlayStation Plus members will automatically receive an additional 5 days of service.”
The outage led to a flood of complaints on social media channels from around the world.
Jeff Thigpen, 48, from Dallas in the United States, 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.”
The outage happened on a key weekend for the gaming industry, according to Connor Clarke, who runs the Sheffield Games Collective.
He said it had been “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 Wilds, and also a double XP weekend in Call of Duty Black Ops 6,” he said, adding that the outage would have left thousands of gamers worldwide “quite frustrated that they are unable to play”.
