A gamer plays on the new Sony Playstation PS5 at his home in Seoul in November 2020 shortly after the coveted console was launched
A gamer plays on the new Sony Playstation PS5 at his home in Seoul in November 2020 shortly after the coveted console was launched

The PlayStation Network (PSN) has announced compensation for players affected by an outage, which marked the longest downtime in its history, lasting 24 hours.

The official X handle of the video game console stated Sunday, "Network services have fully recovered from an operational issue. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank the community for their patience."

"All PlayStation Plus members will automatically receive an additional 5 days of service."

However, many PlayStation users seem to be unhappy with the five-day additional service and suggested providing a free game instead.

"I'm going to need a free copy of GTA 6 to make up for this outage tbh," one of the users wrote. Another one added, "Apology and five free days for everyone in Plus! Apology rejected in its entirety, we want games, not five free days."

According to Sony, this was not a hack, but they have not given a detailed explanation. The company only called it an "operational issue" without explaining what that means.

Outage and gradual recovery

PlayStation users faced multiple problems on Feb. 7, while trying to access Sony's online services. During this time, players struggled with signing in, playing online multiplayer, and purchasing digital games.

While there was no clear explanation for the disruption, the official X handle mentioned they were aware that some users were experiencing issues. The outage gradually improved by Feb. 8 afternoon.

It also affected several online events from different game publishers. For example, "Call of Duty: Black Ops 6" had a double XP weekend running, while "Warframe" decided to extend some in-game events to make up for lost time.

Furthermore, Capcom is extending the "Open Beta Test 2" period for "Monster Hunter Wilds" so PlayStation players, who missed out, can still participate.

The 2011 hack that shut down services for 24 days

The last major PSN outage happened in October, but it lasted only about nine hours. However, the recent outage was still much smaller compared to the massive PSN disruption in 2011.

Nearly 14 years ago, PSN was down for 24 days due to a hack that compromised around 77 million accounts. During that time, all PSN services were unavailable. To make up for the outage, Sony offered players a free downloadable game for PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Portable.

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