• PlayStation players were left with little more than questions when the PlayStation Network went down this weekend.
• The service has been restored and PlayStation Plus members will receive compensation in the form of five days of free service.
• The cause of the outage has not been disclosed.

The PlayStation Network was down this weekend for 24 hours and despite the vitriol PlayStation faced from frustrated gamers, the cause of the outage is unknown.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, the Ask PlayStation account on X posted that, “We are aware some users might be currently experiencing issues with PSN,” before directing folks to a PlayStation Status page.

That was, however, the only update players received until the wee hours of Sunday morning, when connectivity to PSN was restored. As an apology for the outage, PlayStation will be gifting PlayStation Plus subscribers five free days of connectivity to the network.

“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,” Ask PlayStation said on X.

However, while five days of free connectivity is a nice gesture, the lack of an explanation for the outage is rather concerning.

Naturally, many folks were concerned that PlayStation had been the target of a breach. However, there is no way of knowing if PlayStation was indeed breached as the company isn’t saying anything and to our knowledge, no threat actor has claimed responsibility for the disruption. This could change as the week wears on but right now, there isn’t much more than speculation circulating online.

What this outage has done is spark a conversation about the benefits and downsides of services such as PSN.

PlayStation owners need a PSN account in order to access online features within games. As some Redditors discovered though, even single player modes require an active PSN connection.

PC gamers playing PlayStation games ported over to the platform – and some games that come from PlayStation’s raft of studios – require an account on the platform in order to access the game. But as we have now seen, hinging online access on a single network that cuts off all access when it fails, may not be the best idea.

With that having been said however, we doubt PlayStation will change this feature of its gameplay experience. The company says that PSN offers several benefits to players such as content moderation, security and safety.

Of course, if the service isn’t available it also prevents millions from using their console or accessing their games, so perhaps PSN needs a bit of a rethink.