PlayStation Network is down

You might have trouble loading purchased digital games or seeing which friends are online.

You might have trouble loading purchased digital games or seeing which friends are online.

PlayStation Network (PSN) is experiencing some major problems as of Friday evening. According to Sony’s PSN status page, account management, gaming and social, PlayStation Video, PlayStation Store, and the PlayStation Direct website are all dealing with issues.

For gaming specifically, Sony says that “you might have difficulty launching games, apps, or network features.” A colleague wasn’t able to load their purchased digital games or see their friends, trophies, or even their online status on their PS5. Sony is vowing to fix the problems “as soon as possible.”

Sony’s status website says the issues started at 7PM ET, but user reports started spiking on Downdetector at about an hour earlier at around 6PM ET. As I write this, there are less than 70,000 reports of problems on Downdetector, though the volume of reports seems to be dropping. An r/PlayStation thread about the outage has more than 1,600 comments.

Sony didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

PSN had an outage that lasted for around eight hours back in October. It dealt with a partial outage in May, too.