Some PlayStation Network features down heading into Christmas

Santa may need to deliver Sony some new servers for this Christmas.

Some PlayStation Network services are not working for everyone. Gamers are running into problems with some social features with people on Twitter pointing out that they cannot add new names to their friends list or send messages. So far, however, most people seem able to sign into PSN as well as their games.

This does not seem like a major outage — and it is likely just a matter of volume considering players around the world have today off due to the holidays. Despite the reported troubles, Sony’s PSN status site has not updated with any specific information about the intermittent problems.

Of course, the timing has some gamers concerned. In 2014, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assault took the PlayStation gaming service offline for five straight days. It also took down Microsoft’s Xbox Live for 24 hours. Gamers are worried that something similar could happen again this year — although we have no reason to assume that PSN’s troubles are related to a coordinated effort.

And if you look back at the last year since those Christmastime attacks, you can see that both PSN and Xbox Live have gone down without any help from cyberattackers. GamesBeat has reported a plethora of outages — both minor and major — for PlayStation Network since the beginning of 2015. Xbox Live has had nearly as many outages itself, with the most recent one coming last week.