Sony’s online infrastructure had an impromptu outage over the weekend, right now, it’s down on purpose.
PlayStation Network is partially down while Sony engineers perform some scheduled maintenance. The company started work at 9:40 a.m. Pacific time today, and it intends to hammer away at the servers until around 4:50 p.m. Pacific. After that seven hours of work, everything should come back online.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1539467,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"C"}']While PSN is “down,” you can still get online to play games or watch Netflix as long as you signed into the network as recently as Aug. 23. The PlayStation Store, PlayStation Home, and the account-management options are unavailable regardless of when you last signed in.
Today’s maintenance was actually supposed to take place Monday, but Sony postponed that plan after a cyberattack unexpectedly took PSN offline Sunday for nearly the whole day. The hacker group Lizard Squad took credit for organizing a distributed denial-of-service attack (which repeatedly pings a target server with thousands of data requests) against PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, and other games and services.
PSN came back online following the attack late Sunday evening. Due to the timing, Sony decided not to willingly pull the plug on PSN despite the planned maintenance.