A massive outage of Sony’s PlayStation Network transpired late last night and into the early hours of this morning. As a result, users across PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 consoles around the globe weren’t able to connect to the internet and use a variety of features tied to either platform. At the time of this writing, Sony hasn’t provided a public explanation for why PSN went down without any warning, but some fans believe that it could be the result of a hack.
In the wake of PSN returning to normal activity today, PlayStation users across various subreddits have started to try to piece together why the service went down. Longtime PlayStation users from the PS3 era remember when PSN went offline for 23 straight days in 2011. This infamous period of downtime with PSN happened as a result of a data breach at Sony that resulted in the tech giant taking down the online platform until it could ensure the safety of its users. Others found it curious that PSN also went down on the same day that similar outages happened at Xbox and Verizon.
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“Considering Xbox and Verizon had a nationwide outage earlier in the day, my brain tells me they were attacked in some way,” speculated u/buddyguy72 on Reddit.
Although there’s nothing definitive to indicate that Sony was once again hacked, it wouldn’t be the first time since 2011 that such a cyberattack transpired. In 2014, another attack aimed at Sony resulted in PSN having a widespread outage on Christmas Day. Subsequent hacks have since happened in one-off instances, but nothing has ever caused PSN to go down for multiple days as was seen in 2011. Still, today’s outage was one of the longest we have seen in quite some time, which is why many fans are discussing the matter more than they normally would.
For now, it seems unlikely that Sony will provide an answer as it’s rarely transparent on matters like this. Instead, all we’re likely to know from Sony’s end is that “all services are up and running” once again, as it states on its PSN status page. If an official statement from Sony does end up coming about, though, we’ll be sure to update you here on ComicBook.
