PSN is back: Sony apologises with PS Plus gift to players

After nearly 24 hours of downtime, PS5’s PSN online service was restored on Saturday, and Sony has apologised with a free gift to players.

“Network services have fully recovered from an operational issue,” the company wrote in a statement. “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.”

Reports of PSN going offline started appearing in the early hours of Saturday morning, and Sony reported the issue had been resolved at nearly midnight.

There’s still no explanation for the PSN downtime, which left many players unable to access any online services, access their library of digital games, or pair new PS5 disc drives.

Online outages are broadly fairly common, but one major issue arising from this PSN outage is the way that game licenses are handled on the platform, and players with digital copies of their games found that they were unable to play their games.

While some digital titles will launch without internet access, PlayStation will then warn players that the game will close after 15 minutes due to being unable to verify the license for the game.

PlayStation will reportedly hold a State of Play presentation soon. It’s expected to feature Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, due to a release trailer for the game being temporarily uploaded to the PlayStation Network early.