Sony Reveals Compensation For All PS Plus Players After PSN Outage – Forbes
PSNThis article was published on 2/9 and republished on 2/10.PSN is back online after a 24 hour outage, almost to the minute, the longest since the nearly month-long downtime after a hack back in 2011. Now, Sony is announcing the compensation that players will get for their trouble.This was not a hack, according to Sony, but they have offered nothing like a detailed explanation saying only that this was an “operational issue,” without going into detail about what that means, exactly. I think players would like more than that, given the full day outage that we have not seen in a decade, but it remains to be seen if they’ll ever elaborate.The compensation, meanwhile, is simply five additional days of PSN service. Presumably this means that if your monthly or yearly subscription was set to expire, you would get five more days of service before that happened. For players who do not plan on cancelling PSN any time soon, as clearly you really can’t to play most games, it’s unclear how this benefits them in any significant way.Many may have been hoping for something like store credit, but that is not in the cards. With millions and millions of PSN subscribers, I’m guessing Sony does not want to actually give out a dollar based on that alone, much less anything significantly more than that. As of 2024, PSN had 116 million daily active users. Give them even $5 to spend and well, that’s over half a billion dollars. Still, five days of service seems pretty lame. For the 2011 outage, PlayStation offered players free games, albeit that was weeks of downtime, not a day.PlayStation PlusThe PSN outage caused a disruption for a number of games, many of which provided far more updates on service than Sony itself, and some have had to extend or postpone limited time events based on the full day outage that lasted half a weekend, a prime time to play. Again, a 24 hour outage is extremely unusual in the industry, and it was almost assumed it was a hack. But whatever this “operational issue” was, Sony had better fix it so this does not happen again.So, there’s nothing to log in for, nothing to claim for compensation. Just those five extra days to be used…at some point, I guess. Not what many may have been hoping for, and they may get more compensation from the offline games themselves in some instances that what Sony is actually giving them here.Update (2/10): In the wake of Sony’s barebones explanation that PSN was off for exactly 24 hours due to “operational issues,” some are still theorizing that this could in fact be a hack that Sony does not want to elaborate on, lest it raise questions about its security. I don’t think this is the case, as say what you will about Sony, but hiding something like that is not something you can just do.A hack could result in access to sensitive information, including potentially customer information, where Sony would absolutely have to be up front about that happening. Other hacks other places have resulted in the personal data of employees themselves being taken, and that would also be broadcast, at the very least, internally, which would no doubt make its way to public knowledge.Secondly, Sony has indeed been up front about attacks on PSN from hackers or ransomware groups in the past. They would no doubt be up front about this rather than admitting to some sort of technical issue on their end. They would want to explain an outside attack, but they are less likely to say exactly what went wrong internally with PSN, even if that would be helpful to know.It is odd that Sony is giving nothing more than a two-word explanation about its most significant outage since 2014. Even a technical issue should result in some reassurance that it’s been fixed and will not happen again. Maybe such an explanation is still forthcoming.Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts. Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site’s Terms of Service. We’ve summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:So, how can you be a power user?Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site’s Terms of Service.
