Poll: Did the PSN Outage Ruin Your Gaming Plans Over the Weekend?

Image: Push Square

Just in case you somehow missed it, the PlayStation Network — commonly known as the PSN — went down over the past weekend.

The network was down and out for around 20 hours, beginning on Friday the 7th February at 11:00pm GMT, and finally ending on the 8th January at 8:30pm GMT. Yes, the outage lasted less than one whole day, but it still clocked in as the biggest PSN outage since the infamous 2011 incident, in which the service was brought to its knees by a cyber attack for a whopping 23 days.

This latest outage knocked every part of the PSN offline. Users couldn't sign in, interact with any online features, or play online games. And in some cases, people couldn't even play their offline games, because if you haven't set your PS5 or PS4 as your 'primary' console, online verification is needed in order to access software.

In short, it was a mess, and PlayStation came under a lot of criticism for its lack of communication on the matter. Outside of some very brief "we're looking into it" posts on social media, official explanations were nonexistent.

It got to a point where many users were genuinely worried about the outage being caused by another attack — but again, everything was back up and running roughly 20 hours after the outage began.

When it was all over, PlayStation said that the outage was caused by "an operational issue".