Yesterday evening, the Ask PlayStation support account on Twitter declared an end to this weekend's strange PlayStation Network outage, almost 24 hours on the dot after the issues first began. Sony is offering five free days of PS Plus (the paid component of PlayStation Network) as recompense, while Capcom has said that it may offer an extension on the Monster Hunter Wilds beta to make up for the outage's impact.
At 6 PM CT on February 8, Ask PlayStation tweeted that PSN's services had been restored, and apologized for the inconvenience. Later that night, Ask PlayStation tweeted, "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 five days of service."
Ok, but what happened? Sony failed to offer any official update or communication about the outage from when PSN first went down late on February 7, to when it came back online on the night of February 8. Absent any word or explanation, many commenters—myself included—can't help but remember the disastrous PSN hack of 2011. Rumors abound that this was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Sony. Longtime developer and video maker Modern Vintage Gamer argued that some of the client-side behavior exhibited by PSN during the outage lends the DDoS theory credence.
It remains to be seen if Sony will offer an official explanation for what happened—were I a PlayStation customer, I would rather have that peace of mind than any compensation for the downtime. Both would be preferable though, to be clear. Meanwhile, Capcom has tweeted that it is considering offering an extended window of play for the Monster Hunter Wilds beta, which was impacted by the downtime. It's unclear if PC players might benefit from this potential extension as well, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that one. We'll just have to be content with not paying an extra subscription to game online on top of just paying for the games, console, and internet access, then having the service go down anyway.
