Update on November 28 at 6:00 p.m.: PSN is down once again.
It’s a long weekend in the United States, but gamers may have trouble spending that free time playing games on a Sony console.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1845016,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"D"}']PlayStation Network is down on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3. Sony has updated its PlayStation status page to confirm the outage, and dozens of people are complaining that they can’t sign into PSN on social media. This downtime is preventing players from enjoying online multiplayer games like Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Destiny: The Taken King, and Star Wars: Battlefront. But the problem is also affecting primarily single-player games that require a connection to PlayStation Network as well as video services like Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, and Hulu Plus.
But Sony says it is aware of the issues, and it has a team trying to fix the problems.
We are aware that some users are having connectivity issues with PSN this morning. Thanks for your patience as we investigate.
— Ask PlayStation (@AskPlayStation) November 27, 2015
“You may have some difficulty launching games, applications, or online features,” reads Sony’s website. “Our engineers are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, and we thank you for your patience.”
This comes a day after the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., which echoes back to the Christmas outage of last year. During the 2014 gift-giving holidays, a cyberattack group called Lizard Squad hit the Sony and Microsoft gaming services with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) barrage. This overwhelms an Internet server with junk data that prevents real information from properly reaching its destination.
We’ve asked Sony if this is the result of a cyberattack, and we’ll update this story with any new information. We also checked with the Lizard Squad Twitter account that has previously taken credit for these assaults, and it recently retweeted the following from someone who claims they are a part of that group:
https://twitter.com/chippyshell/status/670264310254432256
That tweet, however, does not mean this person is responsible. It’s more likely that thousands of people are all hopping online with their PlayStation 4’s for the first time after getting a good deal on Black Friday.
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Previous update at 8:30 a.m. Pacific time on Friday: Sony has removed all the status warnings from its website.