PlayStation Users Miffed with Sony's Lack of PSN Outage Transparency

Yes... I do want to know.... but if I was a Sony shareholder, I would VERY MUCH WANT TO KNOW.

Over reaction. If you were hacked they'd have already gone public with it.

Edit: also an explanation will probably be given during the investor call in a few days. As the commenter above said investors will want to know.

The entitlement is unreal. Some people need to step away from the screen for a bit.

@get2sammyb I really don't think Twitter has any real people now which is why I don't take their opinions too seriously. Between the bots, fanboys and the algorithm pushing nonsense outrage it all feels too fake.
It is a similar issue on Reddit where a lot of the engagement just seems odd. When Reset Era looks normal, you're in trouble.

I do think Sony needs to build a work around for the digital handshake for singleplayer offline games though.

Why should they say anything? They know they've got you wrapped around their finger, despite any heated comments on social media.
Perhaps if they had some actual competition to keep them in line they would step up, but sadly Xbox has kumbaya'd themselves into the beige paint you see today. So yeah, I wouldn't expect jack ***** from Sony now, or ever really.

What I'd really like is PS to get back to reporting on games news rather than this. It happened and a whole lot of people got upset but is it really this worthy of an article every day?

My God people... it was out for 24hrs.
If this really ruined your weekend then I'm sorry, I really am, but you need a second hobby.

@nessisonett If my livelihood was affected like if my bank or the host of my e-commerce site was down for 24 hours I would expect more of an explanation. Sony could absolutely be more transparent with users but their explanation felt sufficient to me. I mean jeez it's videogames guys, they compensated everyone so lets move on with our lives.

What i want to know is why digital and physical games would not work for me. All single player offline games, Lego games, DOA X3, Yakuza 6, I couldn't play anything.

Its my only PS console. Its set as home/primary and offline is enabled.

Why was I locked out?

As for the people saying "its only 24 hours" "find something to do" "its not the end of the world" are apologising for Sony. Im a paying customer i have bought my games, ***** it if the bank asks me to move out for 24 hours but keep paying sure why not, cant use my oven for 24 hours yay great, no car for 24 hours ill roll on some grass, no heating for 24 hours ill set myself on fire, no electricity for 24 hours ***** it ill stick batteries up my ass.

No matter what i buy or pay for i expect it to work/have access/be able to use it and if i cant i want a reason why.

It never gave me any real problems as I only normally play single player and my Pro is set as my Primary console (or whatever its called these days), just a few minor ones like cloud save, which I can live without for 24hrs!

I do really wonder how much of the 'outrage' was genuine though.... particularly those that say how well 'other' systems handle it.

That said, I think that Sony could have been a bit more informative over the outage, if only to stop some of the silly rumours and scaremongering, and give some basic ETAs, but this is typical of Sony's communication at the moment (and I dont agree with the 'big corporations dont do this' argument).

In terms of the 5 days - its very fair as far as Im concerned (and probably more than fair really) - but I do get a FEW people will not be happy as they only get to game at weekends.

Sony provided an explanation and compensated its customers 5 times over, which is more than I receive when the phones go out, or the power…I’m satisfied.

BTW, it do wonder just how many of these people who are moaning are old enough to remember the 2011 outage. Anyone in their mid-teens wouldn't have been there for it - sorry for making some of you feel old there. That was an actual outage, an actual problem.

I suspect that you'll probably find a very decent split between Zoomer and Alpha as to how much this weekend ruined their lives.

Even if Sony lay out the details and all the technical jargons, what are those people gonna do with that information? Are they gonna help Sony if there's another outage because i doubt they can. Heck, i bet the first thing they gonna do is complaining at social media lol.

It would be nice to know a bit more and certainly to be reassured that the integrity and security of the data stored in the system was maintained.

But in all honesty, when don't gamers get all up in arms about minor inconveniences?

Whether it be over attachment to a fictional character, their political view being challenged by the content of a game, the way a game is monetised, the way a game is distributed, the development of a game and its final state... and the list goes on and on.

It should be expected from Sony now anyway. They haven't exactly been forthcoming with their player base for years.

Not sure the benefit of Sony saying more now unless the outage was due to nefarious reasons. They could have been more transparent at the time but then , the priority was on identifying and fixing the problem.

Will be forgotten about if a state of play is announced today

@breakneck
Isn't that sad? That Sony won't tell us customers what is wrong but they'll absolute bend the knee and grovel before the almighty investors. I don't get why we don't think this is a problem anymore. People are too used to getting kicked in the ass and being made to say "Thank you, Sir."

*a few whiny PS users are miffed. Fixed the headline. Most of us didn’t care and/or have now moved on

This is the All Digital world so many are eager about. Monopoly, pure profit.

Theey have made it super clear how little they care. They put out PS5 talking about 4K aand 60fps, w/ 8K in the box (now removed), new controllers with a bunch a new gimmics but same drift guaranteed analog sticks (hall effect has been available since PS3), not even premium controller has hall effect. They evn sell you the crappy piece of analog that you will absolutely have to swap. This is like spitting in your face.

Flood of remakes / remasters, alongside lack of proper exclusives.

Lack of info, updates, commitment, deadlines, road map for current gen.

Absurd amount of cross-gen, extending as much as possible last gen

BUT THEN DROPPING LAST GEN IN PS PLUS?

While raising PS Plus prices.

Games got more expensive this gen as well, but with most of them not feeling like next gen-worth-more kind of game.

$700 Pro, no drive, no premium controller or headphones, no STAND. If even just ONE game played WORSE than BASE, would already by an awful shame. But it wasn''t just one.

Pulse Elite (I got these) not premium at all.

Thing is that Sony got very cocky because they dominated last Gen and MIcrosoft messed up their greedy gameplan. So SOny thinks they can just milk us dry because we won't stray away.

It's like they don't remember they got ahead when Nintendo messed up with Wii.

We PAY for a service that was offline for a whole day and they don't even care to explain anything.

It's like:

I am making the best salary of my LIFE. I can buy any game I want. But doesn't mean I'll just become stupid and accept any kind of BS because I can afford itwhatever crap we push, we expect you to chew and swallow. And whomever complains is just a crybaby. Pay more, get less and love it.

FIGHT FOR PHYSICAL GAMES. Once it's gone, the whole market is gonna change... For worse.

I've been calling it.

Well we paid for a service. Yes they gave us five days back. I'm glad everyone now sees what this always online madness is going to do to your digital purchases. Void and unusable. Sony need to find a way of letting you own your purchases no matter it be drive or digital. PC users face the same drivel from the power hungry like EA and Rockstar.

It’s poor behaviour from Sony in my opinion. Communicating with their customers seems to come hard these days.

Everyone is pointing fingers at Sony but they use M$'s Azure servers...so who's really to blame??!

@Whately86 what difference do physical games make in this scenario?

None is the answer.

They explained what happened. What did people want?

"Oh, Bill, our cleaner unplugged the server to vacuum. Bill's a new starter so couldn't contact anyone to tell them, until Keith our weekend employee came in and saw the flashing red lights.

'That's odd', Keith thought, 'as those lights are normally green'. However, it turned out that Bill had also knocked the phone line out and Keith was unaware so he couldn't call in the team to fix the red lights until later that afternoon. Bill has been reprimanded and as a company we have decided to purchase a wireless vacuum. The charger is being kept in the kitchen to limit further issues. We'll let all customers know if our kettle gets unplugged."

@Whately86 They are not dropping last gen in PS Plus. They are going to be offering less "free" games per month. The actual catalogue isn't going anywhere.

@Crimson_Ridley This is what IT troubleshooting basically is. Remember last year when a simple update caused one third of the economy to get messed up?

"Operational Issue" tells me it was just some small technical issue. These things happen. If it was something more serious like the hack of 2011 then they would have said so and also I doubt it would have been back up in under 24 hours.

I work in SaaS, you’d be surprised how often 1 expiring certificate in 1 place can cause a massive problem everywhere.

miffed? they must be new to Sony. C'mon now.

@Crimson_Ridley dude you have dated yourself so precisely there. This some IT story from mid '90s? These days, Bill is a new IT hire who got a bunch of SOPs thrown in his lap to get him through the weekend. He did nothing wrong though. The actual issue was that the unit responsible for certificates renewal was down to one guy who had a pre-approved vacation and the rest of the team fell sick. They missed to renew the certs.
Don't you worry though, Bill is getting fired.

Unless all our data has somehow been compromised then I don't really see it as a major issue.

All companies have IT issues from time to time, it was all back on within 24 hours so hardly the end of the world some are claiming it to be.

***** happens from time to time as they say

Are people still going on about this ?? Servers went poof, they took time to fix it, you got 5 free psplus days , now move on jeez "a bit miffed".........

The trouble is there's precedent from the breach in the 2011 and the 2014 Sony Picture hack. It should be concerning to everyone that Sony management are being intentionally vague by claiming an 'operational issue'. It implies, at best, that Sony has not learned from previous breaches by informing their customers and, at worst, they are intentionally misleading their customers.

Keep an eye on your finances and change your passwords.

Reference from Wiki: "In December 2014, Sony requested that the media stop covering the hack. Sony also threatened legal action if the media did not comply. Sony threatened legal action against Twitter if it did not suspend accounts of people who posted the hacked material."

"Operational issue" = someone unplugged a critical server to plug the vacuum cleaner in...

Unfortunately, this does appear to be New Sony's stance on everything - don't tell the users anything. Perhaps a server caught fire, perhaps someone tripped over a LAN cable, perhaps they were hacked by Muskrats, who knows?
Just a simple statement would go a l-o-n-g way. I miss the days of Layden et al - at least they'd give a quick statement about what had happened..

Step 1 - Go outside

In all seriousness though, if you are genuinely worried about it having been a breach and "Sony isn't saying anything", treat it as a security check-in.

Do you have 2FA on your Sony account? If you have a card or PayPal attached, did you know you can use PSN gift cards instead? Is your password unique to this account and complex with upper & lowercase, numbers, symbols etc?

Also in general, when was the last time you did a backup of saves, screenshots, video clips and so on? Now is as good time as any to do that.
On PS5 you can't individually backup specific save files to USB, like you could on PS4, however you can still use the 'Backup and Restore' function to backup all saves. And/or backup saves as part of PS+ subscription.

@DaveSimonH "If you have a card or PayPal attached, did you know you can use PSN gift cards instead?"

Giftcards was removed from all stores here in Sweden about 5 years ago or so. So not an option. And sadly no digital codes either.

If it was a data breach, Sony would have to disclose because most of the countries that have PSN also have some kind of data protection law.

It was probably something in the backend croaking and my money is on Azure given that we still haven't heard anything, if it was a hardware related issue the scope would have been limited to a couple of countries in one region.

@get2sammyb Gamers tend to think that because they bought a console they should be able to find out any internal information they like.

I bought an Audi, I don't demand to know how ther factories work.

Gamers are unreal.

I work as a Branch Manager for a regional bank. Last year around this time (I literally had work on Super Bowl Sunday) there was an attempted hack and we had to shut everything down, work offline, and work through the weekend to reboot our systems. We deal directly with people’s finances and the reactions to that were far less dramatic than this lol.

We took about 2 weeks to go public and even after that we didn’t meet much backlash. We offered every customer 2 years of free credit security as compensation. No one demanded overdraft refunds or cash compensation. 🤣

@Whately86 This is some entitled and unhinged stuff lol.

You can't have ever set foot in the professional working world.

@Whately86 let me tell you this. I’ve never had drift on my controllers over PS4 and PS5. But after my son started using my console to play COD, my controllers on both consoles started drifting. It boils down to how you handle the controllers to be honest. And probably depending on the games you play, and how you play them, you’ll end up with drift.

Almost all my friends who play games like COD and Overwatch end up with drift. It’s a thing that always happens to gamers who play online shooters. And this isn’t an excuse for Sony (or any other console maker because they all get drift) but it’s not an issue across the board.

Again with this article, you guys are really milking it now. you already broke the comment record last time what else do you want lol.

Didn’t most people reply that their weekend wasnt ruined and that it was pretty much not that big of a deal in the end?

Look if it was some sort of hack i’m sure they are obligated to say so.

Netflix, my internet provider(maintenance), my bank app and even my IM messaging app was down more this last year than PSN was the last 10 years.

Of course it’s a little bit of an inconvenience, but come on technical difficulties happen. Once in around 10 years is not that bad.

I’d hate to be around some of these people when life gets a bit inconvenient for them, im sure they would throw a temper tantrum that’d make the average Karen blush.

@themightyant That's great info! Thanks!

@LifeGirl the wildest thing about the 2011 outage is that I don’t remember a thing about it. I remember being heavy into Uncharted 2 multiplayer back then but I don’t remember the outage at all. Maybe I just did something else in the meantime, I dunno…

I’ll say it again, but although I don’t need personal compensation or professional therapy, I was annoyed at the outage. I mean, yeah, I went on with life and worked outside, got some chores done, and watched a little TV during the outage, and now I’m back in the weekly grind. My weekend gaming sessions are usually therapeutic for me to get through the stress of life, alas it will have to wait. Looking forward to next weekend, hoping that this time I’ll have the opportunity to make some of the progress through the backlog that I planned for last weekend. A missed weekend isn’t the end of the world, I agree but I’ll admit that I was pretty disappointed.

I’m the kind of person who never throws a tantrum when I’m at a place of business and received poor service. But I usually appreciate it when the business owner acknowledges when they, for example, get my order wrong, or take too long, or give me a defective product, or just generally do a bad job. It’s basic customer service.

Sony has offered the 5 d compensation, which is fine, and I guess is their version of comp’ing a meal that was bad, but in today’s world with the hacking, the data breaches, the stealing of personal information, and the general expectations of disclosure, you would think they would get out in front of this from a PR perspective. The fact they haven’t makes me think there is still some investigating going on.

Sony generally provides great service and they have a built a lot of good will with me, so I’m not losing sleep over this, but to say I’m not a little annoyed would be disingenuous. Life goes on and I’ll proceed with all the non-gaming things that everyone keeps saying I should be doing. 🙄 I appreciate the advice.

I hate people , they really get on my tiddies

Instead of the "copy and paste" job you did from IGN, maybe write some actual thoughts and analysis of your own. What do YOU think caused the outage? What do YOU think the response should have been from Sony?

What a bunch of cry baby, self-entitled monsters. What do you want? A free PSVR2 sent to your house for the outage? Five extra days for 19 hours isn't enough? When the local McDonald's has to shut down because too many people called off, should I demand a $20 gift card for their "lack of transparency"? Get real.

Sony have been terrible at communicating with their customers for ages now. I don’t think they’ll say anything else; they think what they told us is “good enough”.

Comparing this to the outage of 2011 is like comparing MMA to WWE.

One is a real fight with real pain... the other is kind of a fight that everyone knows isn't a big deal.

Pc users: we don't want a mandatory psn log-in.

Ps users: BABIES! THE LOT OF YA!

Ps users: ....we need a workaround for the log-in during outages!

Pot, meet kettle.

@get2sammyb sure I'm all for gaining knowledge and learning new things

@get2sammyb " operational issue " can mean everything - they s=rew up , they got hacked , their system is faulty or simply they don`t csre enough .

If it turns out info was compromised, we’ll hear about it sooner or later. That being said, I’m not surprised they didn’t explain. Typically they don’t.

At least they said "operational issues."
I assumed they were going to say they "improved stability."

@TheDudeElDuderino Haha, I definitely have. I just like to pretend I'm still in simpler times. Anyone want to play Pogs?

It would be appreciated if they let us know our data is safe, or if a hack occurred.

Instead silence...

I was unable to play BG3 on my profile during the outage, but my gf who has a profile which does not have a psn account was able to play BG3 perfectly fine. So weird!

I think the explanation was adequate but I would like them to address not being able to access single player content when the network is down.