weekend, the gods of glitches had other plans. The PlayStation Network went dark worldwide Friday evening (Feb. 7), and only seemed to be returning more than 20 hours later, making this one of the largest PSN outages ever.
Early Saturday evening, the PlayStation status page suddenly shifted to green across the board with no more claims of service issues. This appeared to be a full PSN outage earlier, with everything from sign-ins to gaming to the PlayStation Store offline. Lately, we’ve heard more reports from first-hand sources and posts on social media that the network is back online for some. Reports on services like Down Detector have been trending down for awhile finally dipping under 1500 around 7 PM Eastern.
The first wave of reports that there were issues with the PlayStation Network came in around 6 p.m. ET on Friday. At around 8:45 p.m. ET, the PlayStation support account tweeted it was “aware some users might be currently experiencing issues with PSN.” There have been no updates since then. The PlayStation status page notes that all PlayStation platforms are impacted including PS5 and PS4 alongside legacy platforms PS3 and PS Vita as well as the PlayStation Store. You’ll have to wait until PSN is back up to play the best PS5 games, and unfortunately there’s no word on when that’ll be.
At least one potential workaround has been reported: The folks at TechRadar had success with reinstating individual licenses through the settings menu to render them playable once more. On the PS5, head to Settings > Users and Accounts > Other > Restore Licenses and then select the titles you’d like to play. The caveat is they were only able to get games working that were downloaded during the PSN outage. We tried this workaround out with existing games in our library, and while it sadly didn’t work, the games do boot up now instead of simply throwing up an error message, which is a promising sign.
This outage has stretched on longer than the previous time PSN was down in October, which lasted roughly 9 hours. Thousands of angry PlayStation players have taken to social media to express their frustration. Call of Duty fans have been some of the most vocal, as the outage coincides with a promotional weekend for Black Ops 6 where players could earn double XP through Monday.
Sony hasn’t given any indication of when the issue will be fully resolved for all users but has confirmed it is working to restore access. Meanwhile, players around the world from Japan to Australia and Brazil continue to report PSN issues.
