PSN is finally online after several hours of outage

The PlayStation Network was down yesterday, preventing all PS5 and PS4 players from playing online. The fault affected the entire planet, with reports continuing into the evening. PSN is back up and running this morning.

Yesterday, the PlayStation Network (PSN) picked the worst time of day to go down. As most people head home from work or school ready to do battle with Helldivers 2’s new flying enemies, many are having trouble connecting to Sony’s online gaming services.

The network service status page remained red for hours after the partial outage began around 3:45 pm. Reports began to flood the Downdetector site, at 5 p.m. The outage lasted most of the evening, ending at 9:30 p.m.

PSN crashed worldwide on Thursday March 21

However, many players were still reporting errors into the early hours. After that it was possible to play games that required a network connection but many error messages “Failed to load data” were displayed under the players’ profiles. Since the service has been fully restored, the PSN status page has returned to its beautiful green color.

Sony suggested that players may encounter the following situations:

• You may have trouble signing in to PlayStation Network or creating an account.
• You may have difficulty launching games, applications or network functions.
• You may have difficulty accessing PlayStation Video content.
• You may have difficulty getting products from the PlayStation Store.
• You may have trouble getting products on PlayStation Direct.

Disruption has apparently struck everywhere on the planet. Many publications on X have reported the problem in all languages. Obviously the memes started flooding in to our delight.

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For some, it was time to find a single-player game that had been abandoned for months, or to start the one offered by PS Plus in March. For others hang the controller for an evening. But for most people it was an opportunity above all to complain on social networks and demand that the PlayStation Network be returned to working order.

PSN is not used to this kind of failure, which is rather exceptional. The last time Sony’s platform faced such a problem was when it banned PSN accounts on PS4 and PS5 for no reason. The error was quickly corrected by restoring accounts that were improperly excluded.