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PlayStation Network Suffers Prolonged Outage, Raising Concerns About Digital-Only FuturePlayStation Network (PSN) experienced a major outage that began Friday night and continued well into Saturday, impacting players on PS5, PS4, and PS Portal devices.
The outage, first reported around midnight, peaked early Saturday morning, and persisted through Saturday afternoon, though some users reported intermittent service restoration later in the day.The outage affected core PSN services, including account management (sign-in, account creation, settings), online multiplayer gaming, cloud game streaming, and the PlayStation Store. The disruption prevented players from accessing online features and purchasing digital content.
PlayStation acknowledged the issue on Friday evening via X (formerly Twitter) but has offered minimal updates since, leading to frustration among users. The cause of the extensive downtime remains unclear. The official PSN status page continued to report widespread issues throughout much of Saturday.The outage has created problems, for some special events. A beta version of the anticipated game Monster Hunter Wild is avaiable, and Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is offering a double XP weekend.
The incident has also fueled discussion about the potential downsides of a fully digital gaming future. With physical disc-based games, players can typically still access single-player content even during network outages. The PSN downtime, however, completely locked players out of online-dependent titles and digital-only purchases, sparking speculation on how such incidents might affect a market gradually shifting away from physical media.The most impacted online games are Fortnite, Call of Duty, Roblox and Marvel Rivals.
