Thousands of Gamers Left in the Dark: Understanding the PlayStation Network Outage

Gamers have been unable to connect to the PlayStation Network, leaving some unable to play digital games for several hours.

According to Down Detector, which tracks outages, tens of thousands of people have reported problems globally, external with the service - although some reported they were able to get back online since.

The outage, which affects gamers' ability to launch games, apps or network features on their PlayStation, has prompted some to highlight their concerns around Sony's plans to no longer release new PlayStation games on discs from January 2028.

Sony's status page, external currently reads all services are "experiencing issues" and it was "working to resolve the issue as soon as possible".

The BBC has approached PlayStation for comment.

"Can't play digital games till you fix it. Yet I can put my disc in and play. The all digital future looks great," read one comment on X, external.

Sony said in a blog post earlier this month, external that new games would still be able to be bought in shops, but they would come with a digital code.

The problems began to appear around the same time as an alert from Amazon Web Services that some servers were facing issues, however this has since been resolved, external.

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