• The PlayStation Network was down for eight hours on Wednesday morning following an unexplained outage.
• Only one official channel remarked on the outage explaining only that services may not be available.
• Sony has not indicated what caused he outage, but fans are speculating it may be another hack.

At around 3 AM South African time, the PlayStation Network went offline leading to a meltdown of gamers around the globe, unable to play any online games for around eight hours until services were slowly restored. Some players, however, are still complaining that services are spotty.

Due to the early morning outage, South African gamers were likely unaware that anything was happening, while most of the northern hemisphere went to social media up in arms, unable to play their Helldrivers II or Fortnite sets.

The outage affected all PlayStation devices, including consoles like the PS5, PS4, PS3, PS Vita, PlayStation Web and other devices and features, since they must all connect through the Network to allow online play, as well as the PlayStation Store, which was down for the duration of the outage.

Just before 4 AM, the only official communication from a Sony affiliate came from a PlayStation support X account in Japan.

“At this time, the PlayStation Network (including PlayStation Store) may not be available,” the account posted. “We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused. We are currently investigating and carrying out recovery work, so please be patient.”

The same account posted just before noon on Wednesday that “This problem has now been resolved.” Allowing players to once again play multiplayer games, browse the PlayStation Store or play singleplayer games that require signing into the network.

Offline games, of course, were unaffected.

Now that services are restored, Sony’s continued silence is deafening. There has yet to be an official explanation of why the outage occurred, and some fans are speculating that it may have been caused by a hack.

Sony also withheld information a week into its disastrous 2011 PlayStation Network outage caused by a hack, which saw 77 million player accounts compromised and saw the service down for more than three weeks, eventually costing the company $171 million.

It is unlikely that the outage this week was caused by a hack, even though it happens often enough, and at least the status page of the PlayStation Network is in the all-green saying simply “All services are up and running” as of press time.