Sony PlayStation Network back online after 24-hour outage

Sony Group Corp. said the issue with its PlayStation Network has been resolved, after its service left thousands of players unable to sign on or stream games for most of Saturday. 

“PSN has been restored,” Sony said in a statement on X. “You should be able to access online features without any problems now,” the company said. 

This came after an earlier statement Saturday that the Japanese company was aware of some users experiencing issues with the Playstation Network, with difficulty signing in or creating an account. 

Downdetector data showed users of popular titles such as Call of Duty and Fortnite began reporting outages since Friday. At one stage the number of PlayStation incident reports reached over 14,000. 

The network's failure prevented many owners of Sony consoles including the PS4 and the PS5 from playing multiplayer games such as the hugely popular "Fortnite" and "Call of Duty."

The specialised site DownDetector.com had reported that users' difficulties peaked sharply around 7:00 pm US Eastern time on Friday (midnight GMT Saturday), before falling steadily, but not quite returning to normal levels.

Players expressed impatience and anger on social media during the outage.

One user said on X that it was "criminal" to have a PlayStation outage on a Friday evening, but another quipped more equably that it was time for him to reintroduce himself to the woman he married five years ago.