As of now, Sony has promised gamers that due to the outage that sent all online Playstation services down earlier in the week, that PlayStation Plus memberships are e to be extended. The outage only lasted less than half a day, so unless Sony is really planning on giving 1 day of free PS+, it's possible that they will be giving up at least a couple of days to make up for the loss in power which is something similar to what they have done around Christmas 2014 when service was down for nearly a week.

As for the actual outage, Sony themselves has not confirmed anything about why the service has gone down, however there is a hacker group that has apparently taken responsibility on twitter for the disruptions.

Again? This is why I play Xbox.

I really wonder what's going on with those outages. If it really is a hacker group, what is their purpose for doing so? If not, why is Sony's tech so unstable?

I'm glad I don't play on my PS4 actively enough to notice these things. Every time I get the feel the need to play on my PS4, the servers are up so I still have no complaints. I do wonder though, why are they down so much? There has to be a group targeting them.

SWTerra : Well, a couple weeks before Christmas, a hacker group did say they were going to hack ALL services on Christmas (XBOX, Nintendo, etc) because they said that people should be spending time with their families instead of alone playing video games.


That never actually happened so if this was a hack, it's possible it was those same people.


LunarDarkness2 : XBOX? Get out..:p

zanderlex : Yeah, I definitely didn't notice anything on my Wii U, except how many people are playing Cloud on Smash 4 For Glory mode (which is honestly awful and laggy and should never be played if you want to get better).

I was unaware the PSN even went down last week; singleplayer games for the win I guess? It's awesome though that they're offering some extra time for PSN members relative to the outage length.

SWTerra : Sony hasn't bothered to update thier network infrastructure in a long time, even after the December 2014 Lizard Squad attack (can we please stop calling it a hack? A DDOS isn't a hack). The way Microsoft has thier network set up makes it a little harder to bring it down as a whole. So, it's not that Sony's network is unstable it's just that it has an outdated infrastructure they don't want to pay to upgrade.

Chindogu : Oh, okay, that does clear things up a bit. Thanks.

Sorry, I'm really kind of out of the know when it comes to servers of any of the three companies, honestly... ^-^"

Chindogu : Wow, i find it hard to believe that you didn't notice it. Didn't you find it odd how few messages you were getting from friends?

Multiplayer wasn't the only thing that went down, you couldn't even buy games or get notifications so when i went on after, I had a backlog of like 6 messages and another 5 notifications from before. Not to mention three downloads that were cancelled.

SWTerra : eh, Why would you know anyways? I'm just a huge nerd :p

zanderlex : I would if any of my friends used PSN lol Their all Steam or XBox gamers when they do play video games on the rare occasion. Where they spend hours playing MtG I spend hours playing wierd little indie games.

Chindogu : Oh, I get it. That's just code for "I don't have any friends" right? It's cool, your secret is safe with me. Or is it? :p

In the long run, it would probably be cheaper for Sony just to do the updates instead of having to offer free things to millions of gamers every time something happens. Heck, just adding 1 day for free to make up for this costs about 20 cents per user, and that's a huge number when you take into account how many PSN users there are, that's basically millions a day they would lose.

As far as I've heard, there was never any confirmation that it was a DDoS attack. The group that threatened to do it never claimed responsibility AFTER this outage, did they? I'm personally leaning toward it being server strain. I mean they did see 5.7 million more PS4 users join in a month's time, and a massive PS+ (so probably online gamers) increase over last year, so it seems logical that an issue might occur because of strain.

And I know PSN goes down more than XBox Live, but people act like it happens all the time when in reality it's a lot better than it used to be, or at least it seems so to me anyway. I game offline so I could be wrong. Either way, they're making it good, so I have no complaints. Heck, I had no complaints anyway, my download wouldn't work so I just put my controller down and found something else that needed to be done until it came back up. But that's me.

Eirinn : I'm kind of with you on this one. While I've never dealt with PSN before, I have had a history of bad gaming internet, since it can randomly shoot up into ridiculously high pings (thanks, AT&T) and my firewall is a pain when it comes to console gaming online, especially with Nintendo consoles, for some reason. I just do something else until I can be online again.

I find it funny that people act like one service is more susceptible to hacking as another service. The reason why they probably targeted the PS network is because of the fact that the PS4 is currently the best selling console on the market. The issue is probably more likely regarding the HUGE influx of users they got this Xmas season and not being properly prepared for that traffic.

Eirinn : I never saw them until, but supposedly Phantom Squad was tweeting as the outage was going on claiming responsibility for it.

Just looked some of them up and these are some of the things that popped up.

puu.sh/mmaa7/519f6ad3b9.png

They can take a global company's server offline, but they can't spell the word "alright" properly? -__- Lame. Lol Honestly unless Sony says it I'll stay skeptical. I mean these people aren't exactly the most honest of the bunch after all. And I find it funny how they can think they're big bad dudes for what they do...yet be afraid to show their actual faces. Guess they know they aren't as bad as they say.

Thanks for the link btw. Never knew they actually claimed it afterward.

Eirinn : Even if its true, Sony would never say it. Keeping quiet at least gives the people some reason to believe that it was a mistake on their end, instead of an attack.