Updated on Saturday at 1:30 p.m. with Sony’s most recent statement.
Many gamers have found it difficult to get online on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 since Christmas, and Sony still doesn’t know why.
PlayStation Network went down around two days ago, and it is still mostly offline. Sony has provided sporadic updates, and that includes telling fans again today that it is aware of the problem. The company went on to say that its engineers are still looking into the cause of the problem, which likely means we’ll still have quite a wait before the system is back up and running again.
https://twitter.com/AskPlayStation/status/548881928150331392
This outage is not just keeping people from playing online games. Many people cannot even sign into their PlayStation profiles, which can keep you accessing the online aspects of popular single-player games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Far Cry 4.
Sony’s latest update comes about half a day after it said that online services for PS4, PS3, and Vita were booting back up.
https://twitter.com/AskPlayStation/status/548757917907034112
PlayStation Network wasn’t alone in its issues on Christmas Day. Microsoft’s Xbox Live also went down for most of that day, but that company was able to get it back up and running for Xbox One on the following day.
A group of cyberattackers, known as Lizard Squad, took credit for causing both outages. Yesterday, the group said it ended its attack after Kim Dotcom, the owner of the file-transfer site Mega, gave them 3,000 lifetime passes for Mega.
Sony wrote on its blog today that its outage is due to a “designed” disruption, but it stopped short of naming “Lizard Squad” or any other group.
If the attacks are really over, PSN’s continuing outage is potentially related to gamer demand due to the holidays. Or damage done by the alleged attacks that Sony is still trying to fix.