Who needs a network to confirm and play the digital license you've rented?
The PlayStation Network went down for hours over the weekend, just following an announcement by Sony that it won’t be producing physical PlayStation game discs beyond January 2028.
The PlayStation Network started to show signs of issue from around 10.30 pm AEST on 24 July, matching an alert from Amazon Web Services that stated “multiple AWS servers in the US-WEST-2 region” were encountering “connectivity issues”.
The difficulties were unfortunately timed for the launch of the Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls open beta, which prompted the game’s official Twitter account to sound the warning bells.
“We’re aware that some PlayStation players are experiencing login and network issues,” reads the tweet from the account. “Our team is actively investigating the problem and working to identify the cause. We’ll share updates as soon as we have more information. Thank you for your patience while we work on resolving this.”
During the outage, Sony’s PlayStation Status page told customers that they “might have difficulty launching games, apps, or network features,” on platforms that included PS Vita, PS3, PS4, and PS5.
The outage meant a host of problems for players — those on a console that wasn’t equipped for offline play would have had problems signing in to the PlayStation Network and launching games. If you’re unfamiliar with how you can enable offline play on a single PS5, we’ve got you covered with a guide right here.
Thankfully, those encountering problems on their consoles during this outage were reminded of offline play, so hopefully that addressed some issues.
While it would have been remarkably easier to play most physical game discs, a majority of titles are reliant upon a day one patch — or series of subsequent patches — which may have impacted game performance. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t in some cases.
Roughly seven hours later, around 5.00 am AEST on 25 July, Sony began to advise that the PlayStation Network was back up and running as expected.
At around 5.10 am AEST, the PlayStation Network status page was updated to read that “all services are up and running.”
Sony has not confirmed what caused the outage to occur as of the time of writing.
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