Gran Turismo Sport’s Director Explains Online Server Outage Over The Holidays

As you may have noticed over the holiday, some fans of Gran Turismo Sport weren't too pleased, as the servers went down over the Christmas break, leaving some players pretty much powerless when it came to making any sort of progress within the game (including saving – yes, you need to be online to save).

However, good news – the servers are back up and running, and players can get back into the racing action, as well as download the latest update, which actually provides some solid new single player content. But what's strange is why the servers went down.

At first, Sony actually assumed that the game was under some kind of DDoS attack, and reacted accordingly by taking the servers offline. But it turns out that wasn't the case – Sport was actually heavy in traffic, with the game getting a lot of pre-holiday sales.

Kazunori Yamauchi, the game's director, tweeted out more information about the down time that the game took. He first noted that the problem didn't lie in GT Sport's servers, and then pointed out that Sony's own PlayStation Network servers were the problem.

"The startup log in problem that had been inconveniencing our users has just been resolved with the support of the PlayStation Network team," he explained. "The cause of the issue was that the unexpectedly large numbers of user network traffic had been mistakenly identified as an attack on the PlayStation Network, and the login attempts were blocked by the system."

But he's already making sure that Gran Turismo Sport won't run into a problem like that again. "Hereon, we will work with the PlayStation Network so that something like this never recurs.

"We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused."

Whew. For a minute there, it almost looked like 2011 again, when the PlayStation Network went down for several days due to an outside attack by hackers. Not the case, fortunately – and now Sony knows how to be prepared the next time a game is a massive hit online. (Or, hey, requires online connectivity in order to access most of its features – something we weren't too fond about in our review.)

Gran Turismo Sport is available now for PlayStation 4.