Update at 3:30 Pacific time: Sony says PSN was down for about 15 minutes, but it is back now.
Sony’s online infrastructure isn’t working for a number of people at the moment.
The PlayStation Network is down intermittently for people using the PlayStation 4. Sony has confirmed the issue on its status website. It is working to address the cause.
“You may be experiencing issues related to launching games, applications, and/or social features such as trophies, messaging, or friends list,” reads the PSN status page.
This is the latest in a string of outages that have plagued the PlayStation Network. Most notably, the system went down for nearly an entire week starting on Christmas Day at the end of last year. That was the result of a cyberattack that also affected Xbox Live.
Since that time, PSN has experienced five separate outages that were not the result of deliberate maintenance. We’ve asked Sony what causes these problems, but it has never provided a response. We have asked again.
For today’s problems, I got online to test my PlayStation 4, and I was able to load Battlefield: Hardline — although I was signed into PSN since before the latest outage began. But while I was able to launch Electronic Arts’ cops-and-robbers shooter, I could not get the mulitplayer to work. Nothing happens when I select that option.
In another test, I started up Bloodborne without running into any errors or disconnection reports. But again, I could not start the game in its online mode.
Finally, I tried looking at my friends list, and PSN gave me an error and said that “connection to the server has been lost.”