Players were unable to log into their account, play online or purchase games from the PlayStation Store.
PlayStation Network (PSN) went through an outage that’s affected all of Sony’s video game services, according to the PlayStation Service Status page. Players were unable to access their PlayStation account or use the PlayStation Store, and the outage had at least one real world impact (aside from making a lot of people trying to play Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls very sad) by delaying the EA Sports FC 26 championship at the Esports World Cup.
Sony’s status page noted that “all services are experiencing issues,” including account management features, game streaming, the PlayStation Store and even PlayStation Direct, Sony’s website for selling PlayStation hardware. The issues also extend to older platforms the company is still maintaining in one way or another, like the PS Vita, PS4 and PS3.
Engadget has asked Sony to comment on the outage and the work it did to fix it. We’ll update this article if we hear back. Sony has yet to publicly acknowledge the PSN outage on its public-facing PlayStation Support account, but was providing updates through the aforementioned Service Status page. Over six hours after the outage began, that page showed things had returned to normal. Some anecdotal complaints online said there were some teething issues in recovery, but by most accounts (and our own checks), things are back to normal now.
The timing of today’s outage was awkward, to say the least. The company recently announced plans to retire physical game disc production by 2028 and make all PlayStation games available digitally. While digital games offer certain conveniences, one way their weaknesses show is when a network outage makes them completely unavailable to purchase or play.
Update, July 24, 7:45PM ET: This story was updated several times after publish to give the most up-to-date account of the outage. The most recent update was at 7:45PM ET, which added information on PSN’s return.
