It's The Weekend, So Of Course PSN Is Down

Legendary. I love it.

why do I need to cancel my gaming plans? last time I checked I can still play every game I own offline

@FullbringIchigo Think I'll change that to 'social gaming plans' - good point!

Since I've still got to finish off the witcher, go to work and have a social life outside of gaming I'll be fine. Shame for those who have made plans to play together and many people who have just picked up ESO but hopefully it gets sorted out sooner rather than later.

@ShogunRok well I'm a gamer so I have no friends anyway (forever alone)

nghh,i need to pay my sub fee! to er,keep er,playing -for goodness sake,pathetic.

This is why the push for playing games online annoys me. If all of our games had to be played online, then we would always be at the mercy of that network. The worse part is Sony only giving us general, non-specific status updates on when it may be up.

Seriously? We need Plus extensions every so often to account for the all the down time.

Just bought batman so im good

I'm going to go for Lego Batman 2 on PS3 and FF type 0 Plats which are both offline, and I barely touched Arkham Knight yet.

@Neolit RE:#2 MS perhaps...

Why Today I need to be online gaming it out jus kicking butt all over the internet and to be getting brand new games omg y this have to be today psn is down.

But i will be patient and wait to psn get bak up i will game it out offline

God they really need to improve PSN... hopefully Sony listens someday and really upgrades. We can all hope, Sony has so much to offer bad PSN is its weakest member at the moment. :-/

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I was just about to wind down and play eso. Seriously I'm beginning to think my switch from xbox to sony is about to be reversed. Lately I've been pissed with sony psn and the supposed," this is for the players", fantastic ps4. Ridiculously slow downloading times for games and updates.

Oh thank God! Sony is looking into it! I was almost gonna swear, but knowing Sony they probably "sent their best engineers", whatever that means. What I do know is that those guys must have angry wives and kids they barely know.

Just started tales from the borderlands (couldn't hold out any longer) so doesn't affect me for once

Don't worry, lads, the PlayStation Store is still up, so you can still spend all of your money on those online games you cannot play!

... at least, it is for me, both PS4 and webstore. I should probably shut up before that goes down too.

It did it at the best possible time for me, right when i just put in a new hdd and need to get my psn login and stuff -_-

This is pretty annoying, but it doesn't affect me seeing as I've only been playing Witcher 3 and Dark Souls 2 on PS4 at the moment.

"Fortunately" I have to work for 30hours straight so no time for gaming anyway. There is for checking pushsquare however

But I was just starting to play shadow fall online after not bothering since release, damn yoooo

It's back up for us here.

@Neolit Yea, I am aware of Amazons service. They are a very interesting company on the whole. Just thought MS would be a bit of a laugh. In all seriousness though, Sony really need to do something about this and your suggestion isn't such a bad one.

@Boerewors Haha probably, their best 3 engineers in the whole world scurrying around the globe.

@Flurpsel 30hours straight? That's madness.

Back working for me. Back to the boring world of Far Cry 4

I didn't know anything about this as I've been play Destiny most of the day, it most be a small problem as there are loads online.

Put me in the camp of stuff like this being why I'm totally against a digital-only future for gaming.

Got plenty of games to play offline anyway at the moment so I'm not that fussed

@Neolit they've got a big cloud infrastructure, but doubtful this would make a difference. I seriously doubt any of the issues Sony have had recently are a result of infrastructure problems. More than likely it's the applications / services running on that infrastructure, in which case whether you're running a private cloud / Amazon / Microsoft / Google makes no difference.

Oh and MS have just invested literally billions in Azure. If they haven't already surpassed Amazon, it's only a matter of time.

@professorhat It's not necessarily the size of the cloud that would help Sony, it's the expertise of one of these other companies that Sony could use.

Just wanted to post, for booted from my Minecraft game because license could not be verified.while in party chat, and able to access psn store.but all games locked.ps4 is not activated as primary but something winky is still going on.

@themcnoisy actually its one of my easiest jobs ever. Im driving around a filmcrew but all I have to do is wait in the car (and get some sleep xD)

@eLarkos But as noted, their expertise lies in the infrastructure i.e. building and running the underlying cloud platform. And I seriously doubt it's that part which is giving Sony the grief, but the application side, which Sony will have developed in house, or perhaps contracted out to a third party developer. Either way, Amazon, Microsoft, Google or whomever are not the ones who are going to be able to help them with this (well MS maybe if it's developed using MS software, but I doubt that somehow!).

@professorhat i'm not an expert on this so i'm not going to act like I am but my assumption would be that these other companies also have very comprehensive knowledge about running services/applications on their platforms. Google, MS and Amazon all have complex online applications far greater than PSN.

@eLarkos they may have this knowledge somewhere in their organisation, but that doesn't mean as a customer you have access to that. Unless you're paying for that service, your cloud provider will generally only be guaranteeing the uptime of that underlying infrastructure. Sony is unlikely to be contracting this stuff out to Amazon etc. since they will either have invested heavily in their own in-house development team (more likely) , or will be relying on the their 3rd party developer to sort the issues.

I work in this industry, so speak with a fair degree of confidence on this, though admit I don't know the full details of how Sony run the PSN, and on what kind of infrastructure / application platform. But i can make some educated guesses!

@professorhat What you are missing is the fact that we are talking about a partnership with one of these companies, not simply a customer. What it boils down to is that I believe MS, Google and Amazon can handle online services far better than Sony and therefore if Sony cant sort themselves out then perhaps they need the work of a more qualified company.

@eLarkos Sounds simple, but if Sony have developed this in-house, what you're effectively saying is they should scrap everything and get someone else to build it up again from scratch, then migrate everyone on to this new platform. Not only would the costs be monumental, so would be the risks of far bigger outages and issues during and after the migration. I really don't think the PSN is in that bad a state!

@professorhat

I think you hit the nail on the head in post #34.

If Sony are running psn on cloud infrastructure my guess is they've with migrated their legacy applications to the cloud (warts and all) or their applications haven't been built to take advantage of what cloud computing has to offer in terms of scalability and resilience to failure.

@professorhat Yea that is what i'm saying. The idea of it being a partnership would mean that the initial cost to Sony would be lowered. You are right though, this is only necessary if PSN really is in a desperate state. I'd argue that if frequent weekend crashes continue and competition increases then it really does need to be considered. Or ya know, continue with an unsatisfactory service until people have had enough.

@eLarkos There have been substantial improvements I think in the last year or two. I genuinely think the solution at this stage is for them to carry on the maintenance work they've clearly been doing, and gradual slow investment to improve things.

Knee jerk reactions to a few issues in a row rarely work out well. Committing vast amounts of money to building a new platform, with a partner who may have a lot of experience with online services, but doubtful any experience in online gaming services which I'm sure have its own unique challenges, could end up with even worst performance / reliability (especially in the short term) and could possibly spell ruin for a company in such dire financial circumstances as Sony.

@professorhat It's far from knee jerk. This has been an ongoing issue for years.
I would agree with you if the digital gaming space was to remain stagnant and allow Sony to play catch up. The reality of it though is that digital gaming is becoming increasingly complex and increasingly important. If Sony can do what you say and continue to maintain/invest in their digital future to the point that they are better or at least equivalent to their competitors then good on them. Unfortunately I don't think Sony have it in them to keep up with the big boys in the online services game. MS and Google (Android TV gaming) prioritise and excel directly in the area where the gaming industry is heading. Not just online infrastructure but also online services. Not today or tomorrow, but a drastic move (partnership??) by Sony is what i believe will need to happen.

Xbox live doesn't have anywhere near the downtime of PSN - And most would agree that Xbox live is already the more complex/superior online service.

@eLarkos I'd agree that MS are ahead of the game on this, but they do have a huge advantage over Sony in that respect because of their other portfolios. I think perhaps we're in agreement that a partnership might be the way to go in their long term strategy. But I'd argue that's for the next generation minimum (and quite possibly further in the future than that to minimise the risk), certainly not in the PS4's lifetime. It seemed to me that people were calling for action much sooner than that, and I would consider any radical short term action as that knee jerk.

We've seen recently that Sony are willing to make these sorts of partnerships (look at the replacement of Music Unlimited with Spotify). So perhaps talks on something like this are already taking place

@professorhat oh right, yea that's fair enough. Yea I was looking further into the future, certainly not today or tomorrow.

I game share with my cousin so I actually can't play the games I bought when PSN goes down =/