Sony sold 1 million PlayStation 4 consoles in 24 hours in North America, and the company has just put its next-gen system on sale in the EU. Those brisk sales are nice for the financial types, but they may have had an unanticipated impact on the gamers responsible for delivering them. Today, Sony acknowledged that the PlayStation Network is having technical problems and said the company has disabled some functions with the PSN down across most of the globe.
Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are highlighting the new hardware generation’s rush to the cloud and cloud services. Streaming movies, downloading games, watching live TV and surfing the web all require the Internet to a certain degree to work properly. The promise of this connected world takes a bit of a hit, though, when the consoles’ online network flakes out.
That’s precisely what has happened to Sony today, acknowledging that having the PSN down to a large extent is an inconvenience but a necessary one as Sony engineers solve the problems. Microsoft’s online presence has had its own issues as well, with Xbox One companion apps not working 100% at times, and with the revelation that the Xbox Smartglass app is the only way to now check Achievement progress being unwelcome to Xbox One gamers.
In response to gamers who’ve seen the PSN down when they login or attempt to do certain functions, Sony issued the statement below via its PlayStation Blog.
“We are aware that users are experiencing some disruption to the PSN service. To minimize the inconvenience we have suspended the “redeem voucher” functionality while we investigate further. Unfortunately this means that money cards, product vouchers, PlayStation Plus vouchers, PS3-PS4 upgrade vouchers and any other vouchers for digital content are not redeemable at this time. Other PSN features such as log in, online multiplayer gaming, PlayStation Plus trials, PlayStation Store (excluding voucher redemption), Trophies, messages, friends, etc are all available. We apologize for the inconvenience and will provide an update soon.”
Seeing the PSN down, even temporarily, may be less of an inconvenience in North America, where the console has been available for two weeks. But in the EU, where Sony just launched its next-gen system, the online network’s outage is bound to be more of a rude awakening. With any luck it will be resolved for all regions soon.
