3 Things PSN Needs to Do Better to Prevent Downtime Backlash in the Future

The massive PSN outage needs to be something PlayStation learns from as it was an all around disaster. PlayStation is one of the biggest companies in all of gaming. Not only do they have some of the best games out there, but their console is also extremely popular. There are about 70 million PS5s out there right now and you can imagine a significant chunk of those are people who have consoles connected to the internet with PSN accounts. People use their PS5s and PS4s for things like streaming, gaming, and being social. When everything abruptly goes dark, it can be a huge bummer for players.

PSN was down for 24 hours and is now officially back. The outage was completely unexpected and we still have no idea what the hell happened. It’s been a strange weekend for PlayStation fans to say the least. PlayStation Portal owners were unable to use the streaming device since they couldn’t connect to PlayStation servers. Players who utilize the game share feature couldn’t play their PS5 games as their licenses for the games couldn’t be verified and much more.

Of course, PlayStation didn’t mean for this to happen and outages are to be expected every now and then. Usually, these interruptions are minor at best and are resolved in a matter of an hour or two, but that wasn’t the case this time. It’s safe to say that this was an incident that PlayStation would like to avoid in the future and we’ve come up with some ways to improve the response if it does happen again.

PlayStation Needs Better Communication

PlayStation has always had pretty rocky communication. If you’ve ever tried using any form of customer support with them, you’ll know it’s difficult to get a meaningful resolution. It’s one thing for a company to have an iffy reputation on things like that, but when every user is looking to you for an answer as to why they can’t play their games, the communication needs to be better. PlayStation was hacked in April 2011 and as a result, PSN was down for nearly a full month. Back then, communication was still pretty rough and lacked the necessary transparency. The channels to communicate with fans were a bit more limited back then as social media was in its infancy, though.

However, it’s now 2025 and there are so many ways to communicate with players. The fact that PlayStation only acknowledged that there was an outage via Twitter and then retweeted that same message the following day is pretty shameful. Fans had no idea what happened. Was PSN hacked again? We still don’t even know. PlayStation needs to push constant updates on how it’s improving things, when users can expect to be back up, and more.

PlayStation users started seeing signs of PSN coming back online in the early morning on February 8th, but PlayStation didn’t say a word about it. Some things were still down, but fans had no idea if this was planned or what worked and what didn’t. Any kind of insight from PlayStation during this time would’ve been helpful. Even when things fully came back online, PlayStation only apologized for the inconvenience. It was a lackluster response.

PlayStation Should Compensate Players for the PSN Outage

Players are investing into PlayStation even more than they were back in 2011. Of course, PSN was down for a much longer period back then, but the disruption here was still notable. Players can pay anywhere from $80 – $160 a year on PlayStation Plus alone depending on the tier they subscribe to, PlayStation Portal users spent $199.99 to basically have a brick during the PSN outage, and players lost out on time in limited time events like the Monster Hunter Wilds beta.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 also has a free-to-play event running this weekend, allowing new players a chance to try it. To make matters worse, Black Ops 6‘s campaign was totally unplayable due to the fact it requires an online connection, resulting in another expensive product that was rendered totally useless.

With players investing hundreds, if not thousands of dollars into PlayStation when you factor in the cost of things like the PlayStation 5 Pro, players should get something out of this. Whether it’s a $10 voucher, a free week of PlayStation+, or limited time trials of big games like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Astro Bot, or God of War Ragnarok, players should get something back for losing a full day of weekend gaming to this outage.

Krispy Kreme literally offered free donuts to players impacted by the PSN outage, PlayStation should be able to give out a small piece of compensation to its players. It’s possible this will end up happening as PlayStation was probably focused on figuring out how to fix things before coming up with the next step, but it remains to be seen. Ideally, PlayStation would compensate players in the future if there’s another extended outage.

PlayStation Needs to Tell Players What Caused the PSN Outage

As already mentioned, PlayStation suffered a severe hack in 2011. This led to over 70 million PSN accounts becoming compromised and personal information such as addresses, names, and potentially credit card information was stolen. It was a mess. Given the severity of that incident, PlayStation players deserve a straight forward answer on whether or not PSN was hacked. If it wasn’t a hack, what happened?

Obviously, not every detail can be revealed for security reasons, but any kind of transparency to help PlayStation players understand how this happened and what is being done to make sure it doesn’t happen again would be valued. PlayStation players spend a lot of time and money on this platform. They deserve to know if they are safe, secure, and going to be able to feel like they don’t have to worry about more outages in the future. Some players are already wondering if a PS5 was worth buying, especially since it has had a big issue with new first-party releases and had tons of canceled games. Anecdotally, I have heard from GameStop employees that multiple PlayStation players traded in their consoles for an Xbox today.

Of course, this is probably a minor number of people in the grand scheme of things, but these incidents do hurt trust. Especially since PlayStation already has a reputation for having extended outages in the past. Regardless of how long ago it was, people don’t forget those things and will hold it over the company’s head, especially when new incidents drum up those bad memories.

While we can expect PlayStation is probably doing a lot internally to make sure this doesn’t happen again or at the very least, can be handled swiftly, the public response also needs to be improved. Hopefully, PlayStation will do more to restore trust with its users this coming week as its comms team returns from its weekend break.