Update:
As of Saturday afternoon, around 4:00 p.m. PST, PlayStation Network services have returned. Sony's PSN service status page claims, "All services are up and running." No explanation for the outage has been given yet.
Original Story:
PlayStation gamers eager to jump into a weekend full of gaming were disappointed to learn that PlayStation Network was down on Friday evening. The unscheduled outage carried into Saturday, and as of this writing, the service remains unavailable.
Thousands of gamers worldwide have been impacted by the outage, which is affecting PSN account management, social features, online gameplay, and the PlayStation Store. So far, the only update from Sony came last night (16 hours ago as of this writing).
"We are aware some users might be currently experiencing issues with PSN," Sony's AskPlayStation account said on social media. The support account urged gamers to check the PSN status page for more details.
Unfortunately, the network status page offers little information. "Some services are experiencing issues," a notice reads. It also lists all of the areas of PSN that are currently affected: Account management, gaming and social, PlayStation Video, PlayStation Store, and PlayStation Direct. The downtime reportedly started on Friday, February 7th at 7:00 p.m.
The lack of updates from Sony has led many to speculate that the outage is due to a hack. It's brought up vivid memories of the 2011 PlayStation Network Outage, which was the result of an "external intrusion. It resulted in personal details from approximately 77 million accounts becoming compromised and prevented PS3 and PlayStation Portable consoles from accessing the service.
The 2011 attack occurred between April 17th and April 19th, and forced Sony to deactivate PlayStation Network services. The outage lasted a whopping 23 days.
I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but there's definitely concern, especially since Sony hasn't offered any substantial update on the status of PSN or any reason for why it's currently down.
Back in 2014, the notorious hacking group Lizard Squad performed a DDoS attack on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live on Christmas Day. This also affected online gaming services, but the attack lasted for only a day. This doesn't appear to be a DDoS attack, though.
Unfortunately, with radio silence from Sony, it's hard to say how long PSN will remain down. Hopefully, it's nothing too serious, but the fact it's almost been down for an entire 24 hours is somewhat alarming. All we can do right now is hope that this outage doesn't last as long as the one from 2011. In the meantime, perhaps we should use this opportunity to do something productive outside. Or maybe just go hope on Xbox Live or Nintendo Switch Online.