On February 8, the PlayStation Network blinked offline, and tens of millions of gamers were left stranded. The outage – which was a global issue – caused players to be locked out of online services and even single-player games, if they were owned digitally. It took many hours for Sony to get the servers up again, leaving many to wonder, ‘Why did PSN go down?’
Unfortunately, PlayStation’s explanation as to what caused the PlayStation Network outage wasn’t exactly the most in-depth thing. Moreover, the compensation that they arranged for the PSN outage was paltry – five days extra PS Plus on your existing subscription.
So, why did PSN go down in February, and what can you do if PlayStation Network goes offline again? Let’s find out.
What Caused the PSN Outage?
PlayStation’s social team posted the following as services resumed on February 8 after around 20 hours of the PSN being down:
Network services have fully recovered from an operational issue. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank the community for their patience. All PlayStation Plus members will automatically receive an additional 5 days of service.
What does that mean though? What is an ‘operational issue’?
An operational issue is typically thought of as any normal business process or system that is disrupted because of a problem somewhere. It could be a server rack physically failing, a cloud server hitting capacity and causing a jarring bottleneck, or a certificate expiring somewhere to take services offline.
It wasn’t a deliberate attack on Sony, nor was it reported as being a human error – but they likely wouldn’t admit that if it was.
That’s all we got from Sony to explain why PSN went offline on February 8 – it was an operational issue. In truth, it could be any number of reasons, but we’ll never be privy to them.
What to do if PSN is Offline?
If you turn on your PS4 or PS5 one day and find that your PlayStation Network connection has been severed, there are a few things that you can do to right that wrong.
I’ve compiled a full guide on how to check the PSN server status, and following that check, what to do based on the results of your search.
Most often, you’ll want to try some of the following steps:
- Restart your console
- Power cycle your console
- Try a different account
- Check your subscription is valid
- Restart your router
- Try an alternate connection
Let us know in the comments if you’ve found a foolproof way to check the PSN server status.
For more Insider Gaming coverage about PlayStation, check out the news that the gaming titan might be cracking down on ‘spam’ games
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