PS Plus Subscribers Get Extra Days For PlayStation Network Outage
Sony announced Thursday how it is compensating PlayStation Plus subscribers for the PlayStation Network service outage that followed a Christmas Day attack and the flood of new PS4 owners. The company is adding time to the premium service to compensate for time that was lost, plus a discount on future purchases.
Eric Lempel, Vice President of Sony Network Entertainment, made the announcement via the PlayStation Blog.
A holiday thank you: http://t.co/dIFNCGZi9X Announcing an upcoming offer for all PSN members pic.twitter.com/aW1NvX2D0j
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) January 1, 2015
“Happy New Year! Since access to PlayStation Network was impacted during the holidays, we wanted to show our appreciation for your patience by offering all PlayStation Plus members that had an active membership or free trial on December 25th a membership extension of five days. The extension will be automatically applied, so no action is necessary to receive the extension. We will post additional information here on PlayStation.Blog when the extension becomes available. If your membership or trial ends before the extension is available, you will receive five days of Plus to enjoy once the extension becomes available (we will notify you when). All PSN members will also receive a one-time 10 percent discount code that can be used to purchase anything from the PS Store. The code will arrive sometime in January and will be available for a limited time to use on games, DLC, movies, and TV shows.”
This is in line with what I predicted in this Inquisitrarticle following reports that some members of the PlayStation community were calling customer support asking for an extension to their PS Plus subscription time. Instead of offering this on a case by case basis, Sony is offering it to all PS Plus subscribers, plus a little something extra for PlayStation Network users who don’t subscribe to the premium service.
The good news is that the PlayStation Network downtime now appears to be behind us. The reports of PS4, PS3 and PS Vita owners not being able to connect on popular forums such as Reddit and NeoGAF have pretty much come to an end. There was also word earlier this week that one of the Lizard Squad members behind the attacks on PlayStation Network and Xbox LIVE was arrested in Britain. There’s also a possible report that a second member was arrested via cybercrime journalist, Brian Krebs.
Looks like the Finnish kid Julius aka Ryan/zee was arrested in Lizard Squad roundup http://t.co/NmqNhwWiex
— briankrebs (@briankrebs) January 1, 2015
The Google translate version of that article is pretty non-intelligible though, so I will continue to follow up with details.
[Images via PlayStation]