Games @lemmy.world

5mo ago

PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why

www.forbes.com PSN Is Still Down After 24 Hours And No One Knows Why (Update: It’s Back)

(18 now actually)

PlayStation @lemmy.zip

www.forbes.com /sites/paultassi/2025/02/08/psn-is-still-down-after-14-hours-and-no-one-knows-why/

33 6

131 comments

Boy, it sure is a good thing that Sony charges a subscription fee for any and all network multiplayer traffic.
- And 99% of the games I “own”. So much for a relaxing Saturday playing games. Fuck you Sony.
  
  Really? We had a family game night last night with the purchased digital edition of Until Dawn just fine.
- Looks like PlayStation’s Auth servers are down among everything else. Even if multiplayer was free, I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?
  Just about everything multiplayer nowadays relies on account / Auth services. Especially on console.
  
  Sure, but if it were free it's a "you get what you pay for" situation. People are a lot more forgiving when they aren't personally losing money.
  
  You used to be able to type in an IP address whether or not the official server is running. Sometimes you still can, but seeing as Baldur's Gate 3 has LAN and direct IP connection on PC but not on PlayStation, it sure seems like Sony is asking them to specifically remove the feature if they wanted it in the first place.
  Then beyond that, you've got a mismatch behind what your money is actually for. It used to be for paying for their servers, but you often don't even connect to Sony's servers anymore. Plenty of games behind that same paywall have their own servers, like Call of Duty for instance, but Call of Duty's multiplayer is behind the same paywall as Helldivers 2, which is running servers on Sony's dime. And beyond that...the reason multiplayer is free on PC is because your purchases are funding them. The majority of game sales on consoles are now digital, just like Steam, and that is a trend that's accelerating. Meanwhile, the subscription fee compared to free online on PC is probably one of a multitude of reasons that people are leaving consoles for PC.
  
  Nobody's gonna dispute the necessity of some sort of server somewhere in the mix. But does it need to be something like PSN? A central 3rd party service that most games only use because they're forced to?
  
  Free your mind! There is another way. Video game servers should be open-source, and the games should permit you to choose a custom server. This way, games can survive the bankruptcy of their creators' companies.
- Boy, it sure is a good thing that Sony backed off charging a subscription fee for single player PC games
  Or should I say, BOY
  
  To be clear, that was not a thing. Just the PSN account doesn't require payment. The subscription is for playing in MP and (I think) access to online media like yt.
  
  Subscription fee? Is this true? Do they have a PC Game Pass service now?
- Unless the game has its own subscription, like Final Fantasy XIV.
  Unless that has changed over the years. I'm not sure.

It’s 2011 all over again
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_PlayStation_Network_outage
- Last night I thought "this happened a few years ago, too, and we got free games as an apology" and now you tell me it was 14 YEARS ago!?
  
  Yes, and I'm also telling you we'll get no free games this time. Business is more of a "fuck you" attitude in 2025.
  
  B..but 2011 was like 6years ago?? No?
  
  It has happened more often than that. The one in 2011 was the biggest outage, but PSN also got DDOSed by lizard squad a couple years after the 2011 outage
- Your making me feel old... I remember when it happened. I was so pissed I couldn't play call of duty.
  
  You're making ME feel old. I remember having to go over my friend's house to play multiplayer.
  
  There was also a big outage on 2014 when Sony got DDOSed by Lizardsquad. So maybe you are remembering that one and don't need to feel quite so old
- I remember being so happy that outage happened because they gave away free games. That's how I got to play LittleBigPlanet for the first time.
- They gave out Wipeout and infamous for free out of that, I got a lot of play time out of those two games.

Sony’s uptime delusions crumbling faster than a PSN auth server. Fourteen hours of radio silence while charging for the privilege of digital serfdom? Masterstroke. Remember 2011’s month-long outage? At least we got free games as consolation—now they’ll just send thoughts and prayers via shareholder memos.
”Premium service” my ass. Paywalls for multiplayer, cloud saves held hostage, and a walled garden rotting from neglect. But hey, keep funding Zuck’s yacht repairs while your PS5 gathers dust. The 2011 apology tour is dead—2025’s mantra is ”fuck you, pay more.”
Reboot the servers, Jim. Or just admit the cloud was a screensaver all along.
- The cloud is just someone else's computer.
  
  You just made a Techbro angry somewhere in the world.
- They sent thoughts and prayers.
  5 days of PSN for free.
  lol

If only there were a way to connect to a network without an intermediary like PSN. Damn shame that it's impossible.
- I think ARPANET will have something like this once they got it working

This doesn't bode well.
The last time this happened was when Anonymous hacked PSN and took them down for a month after they went after Geohotz(cant remember the spelling) for jailbreaking/reverse engineering the ps3.
Radio silence like before as well. I hope they weren't breached again.
- Oh yeah, I remember that now!
- I hope they weren't breached again.
  That's awfully nice of you, certainly not a hope I share.
  
  Why would you want them to be breached? The only people that are going to be negatively affected by that are the users who was involved in the breach.
  Understand hating a company but I find it to be pretty selfish if you're okay with third party being affected just to fit your personal agenda.
  It's what separates the corporate tiers with the consumer level. The ability to care.

I've never thought about it before, but I wonder if the companies with games containing microtransactions can ask PSN for compensation for lost income due to long outages.
- I knew a guy who did this with Comcast for every minute his Internet was out. He'd call them every day for weeks until they cut him an account credit
  
  When I worked at a web host, we had people like that. Being support sucked. Like, yes, it sucks that your e-commerce site that uses horrifically outdated software is offline but, we don't offer quad nines, especially not on a $35/year shared hosting plan. And, honestly Drew, your site gets single-digit visits per month and sells erotica based upon the premise of Edgar Allen Poe being transported to 1990s Brooklyn and working as an apartment building super. At best, you're breaking even on that hosting bill.
  
  I tried this in the first place I lived at where I paid for my own internet, which was Comcast at the time.
  They said (paraphrasing because it was a long time ago) their contract specified they were not responsible for any outages, nor any income lost due to same. I don't know if that's true, but I was young and naive and accepted it at face value.
  
  It is basically just a web form these days (just google "xfinity outage" or whatever).
  They cut you off after a certain number of outages per quarter. And they decide how much money you get per outage. So if your next door neighbor has never reported an outage and you report every single one, they'll get more for that one report.

Musk is currently reviewing it for DEI terms. Also Trump just fired the Sony board and declared himself president of Sony.
- What?
  
  That's your body suffering from whiplash as we're once again back in the era where you never know whether someone is telling the truth or not when they make a wild claim about the president like that.
  
  a play on Trump purging the Kennedy Center and installing himself as chief
- Not my president! 😡
- Inbefore magats: DEFUND DEFUND DEFUND

As of about an hour ago, it is back up

Damn reading the impact this has is some combination of hilarious and horrifying to see people bought into a service like this. If it was free or simply a monthly sub like Netflix I could kinda understand. But a sub to use things you also had to buy? Fuck that.
- Not sure if this is still the case, but with Steam it used to be that if you didn't put the client into "offline mode" ahead of time the client wouldn't open, let alone allow you to launch a game once the connection was lost.
  I hope they took care of that by now.
  
  At least in 2013 when I started using Steam more seriously if your connection dropped it would prompt you asking if you wanted to switch to offline mode. And I know this because I had Steam on a laptop that I carried in my bag hibernating and I didn't had internet in some places I went to. So that has been fixed for over a decade.
  
  Pretty sure they did a while ago
  Especially with the steam deck, you're not going to have Internet available everywhere
- Tbf all platforms have this. Steams not much better. Neither is the Xbox ecosystem. We truly are in the worst timeline.
  
  GoG checking in with no arbitrary server requirements! Why reward companies for treating you badly?
  When companies treat me like a sucker, I move on to companies that don't.
  
  The difference is if steam goes down I might not be able to play a few games. If xbox (what is their service?) goes down you can't play any games.

Someone unplugged the Mac mini
- DOSE, dept of Sony efficiency
- Oh they upgraded from a raspberry pi?

Finally picked up kingdom come 2 on my ps5 just to dust it off after not playing for years and this is my weekend. Well played Sony, well played
- I was looking at that game. Looks really cool. I'm interested to see a more historically based rpg game without mages and whatnot. I think it's based on some section of polish history?
  
  The first one is regularly on sale for $10 or less. Just try it. It's really good!
  
  It's the sequel to the first one, and historical accuracy was like, at the center of of that one. Your character starts off the game not knowing how to read, because in medieval Europe, literacy was not widespread and the son of a blacksmith certainly wouldn't know how to read, so books you pick up in the game are total gibberish until you learn to read.
- That’s a single player game. You need to be online to play it?
  
  It's like the anti pirating software. Drm? Can't tell if I own it or not.

I’ve been playing so much kingdom come deliverance 2 that I didn’t even notice PSN being down.
If you like RPGs try it.
- I fell off 1. Is 2 an improvement to the charming eurojank?
  
  I never played the first one. I just watched a story recap.
  The gameplay isn’t janky just brutally difficult and unforgiving. It goes for realism above all. I’m really liking it but I’m only maybe halfway through the story.
- Isn't it linear story based though? I prefer open ended, been playing a lot of bannerlord recently

Bungie devs who were desperately hoping for a good Heresy dungeon launch: ...I'm getting fired aren't I

"Did you remember to plug the server back in after vacuuming the server room?"
"Shit." "Honey, gotta make a quick jump at the office! "

It annoys me that you can't even look at your trophies for games when PSN is down...

Better than every year or so no one can play the games they supposedly "bought" due to some technical hiccup for a random yet lengthy amount of time than some percentage of people be able to more easily play our games without paying us. -some Sony/gaming industry stooge probably
In all seriousness, people need to stop being so willing to put up with this sort of easily foreseeable failing with the current way of doing digital goods. If I can't use it without the blessing of someone else it is not buying, it is borrowing, and that severely impacts the value proposition for me personally.
Technical issues WILL happen. It is the nature of the beast, it is just terrible engineering to build what is essentially dead man switches into your customers products.

I was just able to get into Helldivers II on my PS5, so it's either coming back, or it's going to real shit

I'll take executive order for 200

Spoilers: it's the weekend and some hard drive is full. Japanese uptake of the cloud was lagging, and I fully anticipate that PSN isn't utilising any big cloud providers scalabaility and we're now waiting on Jim, who is on a long weekend (and well earnt!) to reboot/add more storage/logrotate
- disclaimer: ex-Sony employee
  They probably know how to solve it technically, but they need management approval to do it and there are two managers currently in an internal feud over who has the highest authority and neither wants to admit to being the lowly one for such a trivial request.
  
  I'd believe this in a heartbeat.

I wonder why restoring from a backup isn't working?
- My guess is, like 90% of businesses, they have multiple backups, set up monitoring for when a backup job fails, store them on redundant disks in different locations, dutifully write them on tape too, in addition to a copy in cloud storage, and have never ever tested restoring one.
  
  Or there is a completely different issue causing this and restoring would do nothing.

I know why, but I'll never tell.
- What is it, dragons?

131 comments