Update at 2:15 p.m. Pacific time: Sony claims PSN is back up and running — although many people still report that they are having connection troubles.
Another day, another outage for PlayStation Network.
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Sony has updated its PSN status page to confirm the outage:
“You may be experiencing issues related to launching games, applications, and/or social features such as trophies, messaging, or friends list. We appreciate your patience while we address this.”
This is the latest downtime for PlayStation Network, which has gone offline a number of times over the last several weeks. Over the July 4 weekend, PSN went out twice, once on Friday, July 3, and again on Saturday, July 4. Then it went down for a third time on that Monday. Here we are a week later for the fourth seemingly major outage this month.
We’ve asked Sony repeatedly for an explanation about these outages, but it has not returned our requests.
The company has, in the past, acknowledged the cause of major outages. Most recently, during the Christmastime attack that took PSN offline for a week, the company admitted it went offline as the result of a distribute denial-of-service assault. This overwhelmed the PSN servers with junk data. To be clear, we have no reason to assume that is happening in this or any other case. But that Sony acknowledgement also came bundled with an apology, a coupon for the PlayStation store, and a free extension of PlayStation Plus for subscribers.