Last night, the PlayStation Network went offline worldwide, preventing players not only from playing online games, but also digital games in some cases, and it definitely feels like something other than a DDoS attack may have happened.
At the time of writing, the PlayStation online services have been down for over 14 hours worldwide with no communication from Sony other than a simple acknowledgment that the PlayStation Network is indeed down. Over the past few hours, some users managed to get back online and access their accounts and the PlayStation Store, but no online play has been possible for the vast majority of games, including the ongoing Monster Hunter Wilds open beta.
The almost complete lack of communication from Sony and the prolonged PlayStation Network outage immediately brings to mind April 2011’s outage when the PlayStation online services stayed offline for 21 days due to an attack from hackers where 77 million accounts were compromised, and personal details were stolen. To compensate players for the outage, Sony launched a Welcome Back program, which offered a month-long PlayStation Plus free membership and a month extension for free users and two free games for each user, among a total of five PlayStation 3 games and four PlayStation Portable games. Hopefully, the new outage hasn’t been caused by another hacking attack, and the service will return shortly with a proper explanation of what has happened.
