PlayStation Network, officially abbreviated PSN, is an entertainment service provided by Sony Computer Entertainment for use with the PlayStation family of video game consoles, Sony tablets, smartphones, Blu-ray players and HDTVs. The PlayStation Network encompasses online gaming, music, television and movie streaming services.Key parts of the PlayStation Network are currently down for a majority of users. The PSN Status page shows Account Management, Gaming and Social, PlayStation Video, and the PlayStation Store are all currently experiencing issues on the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation 4. IGN has reached out to Sony and will update with any additional information.
Days after being hit by an outage, the PlayStation Network, one of the world’s biggest online gaming platforms, is reportedly down again. According to Gaming Rant, the PlayStation network is facing yet another outage before the 4th of July weekend. Several PSN users have confirmed that various services through PSN were not functional on the PS3 and the PS4 consoles. These services included access to the PlayStation Store, PlayStation Video, and PlayStation Plus. Users who were logged out were unable to sign in and access their profile. In short, the entire PlayStation Network has been rendered useless for the time being.
Sony has acknowledged that there is a problem with the Network and has updated about the same on its PSN Status page. The current entries on the page lists several problems within the network and confirm that PlayStation Store, PlayStation Now, and PlayStation Video are all affected. PlayStation Vue, however, is listed as functional. Account management and sign in functionalities remain non-functional as well, the entries confirm.
Incidentally, the PlayStation network outage comes just a day before the United States celebrates its Independence Day, giving rise to questions regarding the cause of the outage. The PlayStation Network has been the target of several DDoS attacks in the past as well. That said, there is no confirmation until now if the current outage is indeed due to a DDoS attack. Millions of U.S. Citizens who were planning for an extended gaming session on their PlayStations have been left fuming — thanks to this latest outage.
In the past, several hacking groups have attacked large networks — including PSN and Xbox Live. The Lizard Squad in particular has been blamed for several such attacks. However, so far, they have not come forth and acknowledged that the current outage has been caused by them. The biggest attack on PSN happened back in 2011 when user data belonging to several millions of people were breached by hackers. At the time of filing this report, PSN’s rival network XBOX Live is up and running fine without any issues.
