On Friday, 7 February, the PlayStation Network (PSN) experienced an outage that lasted nearly 24 hours, making it the second-longest downtime in its history—only behind the infamous 2011 outage that stretched for 23 days.
Initially, Sony did not provide a reason for the disruption, leaving players to speculate. However, the company later attributed the issue to an unspecified “operational issue.”
To compensate for the outage, Sony is offering all PlayStation Plus members an additional five days of service.
However, this gesture, along with Sony’s vague explanation, has done little to appease frustrated users. Many continue to demand a clearer account of what caused the disruption and what measures the company will implement to prevent similar incidents in the future.
The most frustrating aspect of the downtime was its impact on games requiring an internet connection became unplayable. As a result, many PS4 and PS5 owners found their consoles effectively reduced to expensive paperweights or they can only play offline single-player games.