It's been 24 hours, is PSN still down?

Modified Feb 09, 2025 13:59 GMT

Discussing the recent PSN outage (Image via PlayStation)

Fortunately no, PSN is now online. At 4 pm PT on February 7, 2025, PSN suffered a massive outage, leaving players unable to access online features on their PlayStation systems. This rendered many games, such as Fortnite, Call of Duty, Marvel Rivals, and more, unplayable. Many feared this might be the second coming of the 2011 PSN outage, which lasted for 23 days starting April 20, 2011. However, finally, after nearly 24 hours, the service is back up and running.

Although PlayStation acknowledged the global outage, it has yet to discuss the reasons for this outage.

Read on to learn about the possible reasons behind the latest PlayStation Network outage.

What caused the PSN outage? Possible reasons explored

The PlayStation Network (PSN) outage of February 7, 2025, has left millions of players frustrated. This was the longest disruption of the service this decade so far. As of writing, PlayStation hasn't explained the cause of the recent global outage and this has left many users speculating the possible reasons.

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Below are some of the possible reasons for the recent PlayStation Network outage:

Cybersecurity breach

Similar to 2011's PSN outage, many believe the PlayStation Network had suffered another cybersecurity breach. To prevent hackers from accessing the private data of users, Sony might have brought down the servers.

Maintenance issues

Although highly unlikely, some users believe that this was a routine maintenance gone wrong. It's common for companies to shut down their servers for a brief time for maintenance. However, if something goes wrong, it would take a long time for them to bring the servers back up. This is especially true if potential exploits were identified during the maintenance.

Also read: Can you play offline games on PS5 during PSN outage?

DDoS attack

Another possible reason is a DDoS attack. Back during Overwatch 2's launch, it too suffered a similar fate, which made the game unplayable. Although there are security measures in place to prevent such attacks from disrupting the service, no system is invulnerable.

Hardware failure

At the end of the day, servers are made of hardware, and if things go wrong, they can cause an outage. Hence, if there was a critical failure in the servers, this could easily lead to service disruptions for hours.

Replacing faulty hardware, restarting the servers, and ensuring data integrity can certainly take some time, especially if the issue is complex or requires technicians to coordinate their efforts across multiple data centers.

That concludes our foray into the possible reasons behind the recent PlayStation Network outage.

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Edited by Sijo Samuel Paul