The latest PSN outage did not go unnoticed by PS5 and PS4 players who shared their dissatisfaction on the Web. Right at the time of the release of Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Rise of the Ronin, it’s bad luck.
Everyone remembers the famous PSN Gate. The hacking of the PlayStation Network which forced Sony Interactive Entertainment to disconnect its network for ten days. An intrusion during which millions of data were stolen, without the manufacturer being able to do anything at the time. Apart from suspending its servers to prevent hackers from continuing their work. Fortunately, an event of this magnitude has never happened again, but on the other hand, there can be malfunctions from time to time. Failures that always irritate users.
A new embarrassing outage for the PSN
On the evening of March 21 to 22, 2024, the PSN went down. A new PlayStation Network hack? No. But for a few hours there were disruptions leading to the unavailability of the most important services. Namely online gaming, the PlayStation Store as well as the management of PS5 and PS4 user accounts. As the hours passed, some came back, but not the PS Store and it was clearly the wrong day for that. At midnight, on the night of March 21 to 22, 2024, players were on the starting blocks to unlock their digital copy of two huge releases of the week and even the month. Dragon’s Dogma 2 and the PS5 exclusive between Nioh and Ghost of Tsushima, Rise of the Ronin. Except that without PSN, it was impossible to play it.
But shortly before the games went live, PSN was restored. Good news ? Yes, but that didn’t stop PS5 and PS4 players from storming the networks to complain with the hashtag #PSNDown. Not happy, not happy! Some people complained after this PSN outage because of the recent price increase for PS Plus. When you pay more, on paper, you expect a better quality product. In reality, it is of course more complicated, but some users still wanted to bring up this big increase in prices. An increase which climbed to almost 35% with a PlayStation Plus Premium which went for example from €119.99 to €151.99 per year.
An obvious denial of democracy
The second point that annoyed PS5 and PS4 players with this PSN outage on March 21 is that it happened, as said above, just before very big releases. The worst possible time which had to add additional pressure to restore services as quickly as possible. And of course, some cried denial of democracy, because they simply couldn’t spread it by playing Helldivers 2. The multiplayer phenomenon game from the beginning of the year which has already sold more than 8 million ‘copies. Currently, all PSN services are in the green as shown by our in-house capture.