PSN Down Due To External Factors Affecting DLC And Games

Sony’s Gaming and Social arms of the PSN are experiencing difficulties today according to the official support page at PlayStation.com. The reasons given by Sony for the service outage is “factors external to PSN.”

According to the status page, Sony is letting its users know that the problem isn’t an internal one. Rather the reasons many gamers are having trouble launching games on the PlayStation 3 or PlayStation 4 today is something outside of Sony’s PSN. According to the service post, gamers “may be experiencing issues related to launching certain games or game functionality. This is due to factors external to PSN. We are tracking the progress of the resolution of the issue.” PSP and PS Vita owners seem to be unaffected at this time.

At our offices we were able to boot up both consoles just fine as the outage does not seem to be affecting all gamers equally. Destiny worked just fine on both the PS3 and PS4 as did Final Fantasy XIV on both systems.

Sony says that they are “tracking the progress of the resolution of the issue.”

Polygon made an interesting possible connection to other issues PlayStation gamers have been experiencing this week. In a post on the PlayStation support forums, the company’s European branch admitted to a report of users experiencing slower than usual download speeds from the Playstation Store. The network support team was notified but no firm answers as to why this issue exists have been forthcoming.

It is also possible that this is a continuation, or complication on top of the issue other PlayStation owners have experienced with leaderboards in Batman: Arkham Knight, which have been MIA since Tuesday night. Additionally, owners of Battlefield Hardline Ultimate Edition on the PS4 have been unable to play the new DLC as part of the “Criminal Activity” expansion.

The Sony PSN is no stranger to outages both for internal and external reasons. The biggest “external intrusion” on PSN was in 2011 when personal details from nearly 77 million accounts were compromised and brought down the entire network for almost a month and garnered international political attention. During the 2014 Christmas season, the Inquisitr reported that another group of hackers brought down both Xbox Live and PSN and were only bought off in an appeasement deal with third party entity, Kim Dotcom.

We don’t know why PSN is experiencing difficulty as of yet and the Inquisitr will update this story with any news as it happens.

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