Over the weekend, PlayStation Network suffered an unexpected outage, preventing PlayStation gamers from accessing many of the service's features. The outage began on Friday evening and wasn't resolved until late Saturday afternoon.
For almost an entire day, gamers on PlayStation were unable to access their PSN account, the PlayStation's social features and online gameplay (including any games that required PSN), and the PlayStation Store. PlayStation simply stated at the time they were "experiencing issues with PSN" but offered little else in terms of details.
The lack of updates from PlayStation led to speculation that PSN was undergoing a possible hack. Now that the issue has been resolved, Sony has finally explained the cause of the outage. According to Sony support channel Ask PlayStation," PSN was suffering from "an operational issue."
It's some vague terminology that doesn't fully explain why there was an operational issue, but it's comforting to know that none of our personal information, or bank accounts, were breached.
Sony did issue an apology fo the inconvenience and even has a make-good offer for everyone that was affected.
"All PlayStation Plus members will automatically receive an additional 5 days of service," PlayStation announced. The extra days will automatically be applied to all plans and accounts, so there's nothing you actually need to do to receive the bonus.
Naturally, because this is the internet, not everyone was happy with Sony's response or handling of the situation. Some believe they should be compensated with more than five additional days of PSN, especially since the outage occurred during the weekend when most have free time to actually play games.
On the flip side, Sony really didn't have to do anything. Outages, while rare, do happen on occasional because that's just the nature of technology. As long as no personal information was leaked, then there's really no actual harm done, other than forcing us to go outside for a few extra hours on the weekend.
Still, this was one of PSN's longest outages since 2011 when the service was attacked by an 'external intrusion." That resulted in personal details from approximately 77 million accounts becoming compromised and prevented PS3 and PSP consoles from accessing the service. The 2011 attack forced Sony to deactivate PlayStation Network services for 23 days. So yeah, it could have been worse.
This outage, however, does serve as a grim reminder of the downsides of an always-connected gaming environment. Even those who purchased digital games were unable to play them if they required internet connection.