PSN went offline last weekend for over 24 hours.
PushSquare has a timeline of events indicating that Sony’s online services went offline last Saturday, February 8, 2025, at around 8 AM, was mostly restored on Sunday, February 9, at around 8 AM, and restored full functionality on the same day, by 2 PM.
In between, some Sony users noticed they had partial access to some services, but for the most part the service was inaccessible around the world. Sony acknowledged the outage on their Ask PlayStation Twitter account two hours after the outage started, saying this:
“We are aware some users might be currently experiencing issues with PSN.”
They then linked to a webpage on the Ask PlayStation website, which only said that the service was experiencing issues.
When the Ask PlayStation account finally officially confirmed full restoration of services, they said that PlayStation Plus subscribers would be getting an additional five days of service automatically.
Reuters later cited Downdetector tracking information stating that the outage affected 7,939 users in the U.S. and around 7,336 users in the UK. That gives us a rough estimate of at least 15,000 users who were affected by the outage, because they were actually trying to use the service at the time it happened.
The lack of communication and transparency throughout these 24 hours created a small atmosphere of FUD and uncertainty. Some gamers, remembering the 2011 PSN outage, vocally raised fears that Sony had once again been hacked. That meant this was more than an inconvenience or annoyance, as they were worried that their information had been compromised again.
There’s no evidence thus far of a hack, and Sony has yet to confirm or deny why the outage happened. But it is true that Sony told their users their information had been compromised one week after the 2011 hack happened. So there is reason to distrust Sony when it comes to their messaging about this outage.
However, it is not true that Sony’s PlayStation 5 does not allow users to play their games offline, digitally and on disc. As explained in this PlayStation support page, the PlayStation 5 is set to disable offline play when you get it out of the box. This is ostensibly to enable sharing games, and you have to go out of your way to change sharing and offline settings to re-enable it.
For the PlayStation 4 (and the PlayStation 3), one can put in a disc and play the game that way, assuming the disc contains the full game, and the developers do not require online logon. In most other cases, you will need to set a primary PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 3 console, and that primary console will be able to play digital games online.
One can criticize Sony for failing to communicate this properly. Perhaps, given players who were going to use Sharing were going to change the options anyway, they should have enabled offline play by default instead. And the argument can be made that this was an active choice by Sony to discourage their users from going offline.
Of course, these are also irrelevant points when we are talking about online only games, which include but are not limited to live service games. Given that most PlayStation users now play live service games like Fortnite almost exclusively, we know for sure that this outage actively affected most PlayStation gamers.
While we wait for more information from Sony to assuage, or confirm, their customers’ worst fears, this situation raises questions on the sustainability of the live service model. Because it didn’t happen this time, but what happens to those Fortnite players if they can’t play for 23 days like in 2011? If the industry is paying attention, they should be drawing out plans right now.
