Sony is giving PlayStation Plus subscribers a five-day extension following a global outage of the PlayStation Network (PSN) that lasted nearly 18 hours. The outage started on Friday evening on 7 Feb 2025 and stretched till 8 Feb 2025. The PSN outage left users unable to access online games, digital content, and multiplayer services.
The outage hit players across the globe, with many reporting problems signing in or loading their digital games. According to Downdetector, a service that tracks real-time outages, nearly 8,000 reports came from US users and over 7,300 from the UK at its peak on Saturday afternoon.
By Saturday evening, Sony confirmed that the issue had been resolved but did not disclose specific reasons for the downtime.
Sony admitted to the disturbance in a post on X (formerly Twitter) and confirmed that all PSN services were up and running again. "Network services have fully recovered from an operational issue. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank the community for their patience," the company said.
Sony also announced that, as a goodwill gesture to compensate for the hassle, the company would automatically extend all PlayStation Plus subscribers' subscriptions for five days without any further action on the part of the users.
This is the second major outage for the PlayStation Network. It was in 2014 that Sony's network crashed for several days during the holiday season, infuriating millions of players. Another breach in 2011 exposed the personal data of 77 million users. Thus, forcing Sony to shut the network down for a month and face regulatory probes.
PSN is a significant component of Sony's gaming platform, providing millions of PlayStation users worldwide with service. PlayStation Plus membership extension is the next step to ensure that the goodwill of subscribers is maintained.
An automatic five-day extension will be applied in the coming days to compensate affected users.