PSN is back up after a 24 hour outage, practically to the minute, the longest since a nearly month-long downtime caused by a breach in 2011. Sony is now disclosing the recompense that players will receive for their trouble.
Sony claims that this was not a hack, but they have not provided a clear explanation, just stating that it was a “operational issue,” without specifying what that means. Given the full-day outage that we haven’t experienced in a decade, I believe players would want more, but it’s unclear whether they’ll ever elaborate.
Meanwhile, the reimbursement is simply an additional five days of PSN service. This presumably suggests that if your monthly or yearly subscription was about to expire, you would have five more days of service before it did. For players that do not want to quit PSN anytime soon, given most games are clearly unplayable, it is unclear how this improves them significantly.
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Many people may have hoped for store credit, but that is not in the cards. With millions and millions of PSN subscribers, I’m betting Sony doesn’t want to give even a single dime based on that, let alone something significantly more. As of 2024, the PSN had 116 million daily active users. Give them even $5 to spend, and that’s more than half a billion dollars. Still, five days of service seems insufficient. PlayStation provided players with free games during the 2011 outage, despite the fact that it lasted weeks rather than a single day.
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The PSN outage disrupted a number of games, many of which offered considerably more service upgrades than Sony themselves, and several had to extend or postpone limited-time events due to the full-day outage, which lasted half a weekend and was a popular time to play. Again, a 24-hour outage is highly unusual in the sector, and it was virtually considered to be a hack. But whatever the “operational issue” was, Sony needed to rectify it so that this did not happen again.
So there’s nothing to log in for, and nothing to seek recompense for. I suppose I’ll use the additional five days at some point. Not what many people were hoping for, and in certain cases, they may receive more money from offline games than Sony is offering here.
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Update (2/10): Following Sony’s bare-bones explanation that PSN was down for exactly 24 hours due to “operational issues,” some are still speculating that this could be a breach that Sony does not want to elaborate on for fear of raising security concerns. I don’t believe this is the case; say what you want about Sony, but hiding something like that is not something you can simply do.
A hack might allow access to sensitive information, including potentially customer information, in which case Sony would have to be completely transparent about it. Other hacks have resulted in the theft of employees’ personal information, which would be aired internally and would very certainly become public knowledge.
Second, Sony has previously been open about attacks on the PlayStation Network by hackers or ransomware groups. They would undoubtedly be upfront about this rather than admitting to some sort of technical problem on their end. They would want to explain an outside attack, but they are less likely to tell exactly what went wrong inside with PSN, even if that information is useful.
It’s odd that Sony is providing only a two-word explanation for its most serious outage since 2014. Even a technical issue should provide some assurances that it has been resolved and will not occur again. Perhaps such an explanation is yet forthcoming.
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