Sony’s gaming service is having a rough week as PlayStation Network outages continue into Friday. PS4 and PS3 players around the world have taken to social media to complain about encountering errors when trying to use PSN, and Sony has confirmed the problems on its status site.
“You may have some difficulty launching games, applications, or online features,” reads Sony’s status page. “Our engineers are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, and we thank you for your patience.”
PSN was just down for a significant amount of time on January 23 and 24. I’ve reached out to Sony to ask if its servers are struggling due to updates that address the recently revealed Meltdown and Spectre exploits in processor architecture. Of course, Monster Hunter just launched on PS4 and Xbox One, so that game’s debut could have attracted so many players that it has overwhelmed Sony’s backend. I’ll update this post with any new information from the company.
As with the previous PSN outage this week, this is a widespread problem that is affecting most PlayStation features. Players are encountering errors signing into their accounts, booting up games, and teaming up with friends. This is preventing people from getting into online multiplayer sessions in hit releases like Call of Duty: WWII, Destiny 2, and the aforementioned Monster Hunter: World. But it is also affecting primarily single-player games as we
The outage is also affecting Sony’s PlayStation Now service on PC as well as its consoles. Netflix, Amazon Video, and Hulu are also failing to load on PS4 and PS3 for many people.
As I wrote on Tuesday, Sony has done a fine job of improving the stability of PSN over the last two years. The service rarely goes offline. At the same time, it’s not often that a new Monster Hunter comes out on the PlayStation consoles.
