PSN is down for gamers around the world (update: it’s back up)

Updated at 8:30 p.m. PST: PlayStation Network is back

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As people are tweeting, PSN is back online. Very sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience. https://t.co/y3aO5iiWfn

— Shuhei Yoshida (@yosp) January 5, 2016

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Updated at 3:30 p.m. PST: PlayStation Network has now spent around 8 hours offline. Sony has still not responded to our request for a comment. 

Sony’s online-gaming service is not working for everyone.

PlayStation Network is down, according to Sony Computer Entertainment America. The company has updated its status page to confirm the outage. This is preventing gamers on both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 from loading up online multiplayer sessions in blockbusters like Destiny: The Taken King and Call of Duty: Black Ops III. It’s even causing issues with some players trying to log into primarily single-player experiences like Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. On top of that, PlayStation owners are running into problems launching video apps, such as Hulu and Netflix.

Here’s what the company says on its service-status website about PSN:

“You may have some difficulty launching games, applications, or online features. Our engineers are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, and we thank you for your patience.”

Sony also acknowledged the problems on Twitter.

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We're aware that some users are having trouble accessing PSN. Thanks for your patience as we investigate. https://t.co/8hMUSl2cCe

— Ask PlayStation (@AskPlayStation) January 4, 2016

According to the hundreds of complaints on social-media sites like Twitter, this downtime is affecting a wide number of players. We’ve asked Sony for more information about today’s problems, and we’ll update this post with any new comments.

This is the first big outage of the new year for either PlayStation Network or Xbox Live. Both services ended 2015 on a strong note; neither had any significant problems during the Christmas holidays. That’s compared to the end of 2014, when PSN went down for five days and Xbox Live stopped working for 24 hours. In both of those cases, a distributed denial-of-service assault (DDoS) was the primary cause. Console gamers were expecting the responsible cyberattackers (or a copycat group) to do something similar to cap off 2015. Instead, both services remained up and running and kept their players happy — although we can’t say the same about PC-gaming service Steam.

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It’s also worth noting that while both PSN and Xbox Live.have gone offline a number of times over the last 12 months, cyberattackers had nothing to do with most of those incidents.

Updated at 12:30 p.m. PST with Sony’s comments on Twitter.