PlayStation Network Is Down, And It Couldn’t Come On A Worse Day For Monster Hunters [Update]

PlayStation 4 owners eager to go hunt monsters or challenge themselves against Dragon Ball warriors got a dose of bad news Friday. The PlayStation Network is down, and it is affecting multiple different services on Sony’s consoles.

PSN is currently suffering from an outage, per the PlayStation Network Service Status site. It is affecting all aspects of the online service, from online multiplayer to communicating with friends. It has also brought down the PlayStation Now service and the ability watch videos on Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu applications on the PS4 and PS3.

Update: PSN is back online. The total downtime was around two and a half hours.

Unfortunately, this is the second time in a week PSN has been down. The online service also suffered an outage on January 23 and 24, as VentureBeat noted at the time.

While this obviously affects every game, it comes at a bad time with the launch of both Monster Hunter World and Dragonball FighterZ on Friday. Both are highly-anticipated new entries for their respective fan bases, and PSN being offline affects significant portions of both games.

The good news is Monster Hunter World and Dragon Ball Fighter Z both have a single-player mode that is available offline. PS4 owners may experience some errors, however, if their console is still connected to the internet while PSN is down. Games that require an online connection to do anything, like Destiny 2 and The Division, will be completely unavailable while PSN is offline.

Sony has made no statement regarding today’s PSN outage or the recent outage earlier this week beyond informing users the service is down. It was vulnerable to Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks just a couple of years ago and was brought down several times by so-called hacking groups looking for internet fame or the enjoyment of inconveniencing others. Sony has worked to greatly improve the reliability since then but experiencing multiple issues in the same week will naturally cause reason for concern.

Oddly, VentureBeat says it reached out to Sony to find out if the PSN issues are due to the recently revealed Meltdown and Spectre process architecture exploits. That seems highly unlikely as those exploits require highly specific conditions in order to be effective.