Sony’s online gaming infrastructure isn’t working for everyone right now.
PlayStation Network on PlayStation 4 is preventing many people from connecting, according to complaints on social media. While the outage is seemingly affecting many people right now, it has come and gone all day, but Sony has not confirmed any troubles on its PSN status website.
This downtime is preventing players from signing into PSN to play online multiplayer games like Destiny: The Taken King and Call of Duty: Black Ops III. But it also prevent players from booting up primarily single-player games like Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate.
It’s not too surprising that PSN is having a rough time right now considering that we’re at the point of the year where people spend the most time gaming. In the last month, we’ve seen the release of Fallout 4, Star Wars: Battlefront, and Call of Duty: Black Ops III. And even games that don’t have multiplayer, like Fallout, can still have an impact on PSN since most PS4s are connected to the PSN network at all times.
PlayStation Network has gone down several times in 2015. It’s had at least five major outages prior to this that kept people from playing certain games and using video services for several hours since last holidays. Of course, it was last Christmas that cyberattackers took down PSN for five days with a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Since then, we’ve seen no evidence that a DDoS is responsible for PSNs troubles since then.
At the same time, Sony isn’t alone in having these troubles. Xbox Live has had nearly as many outages since going down for 24 hours last Christmas due to the same cyberattack.