PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why
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I wonder why restoring from a backup isn't working?
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disclaimer: ex-Sony employee
They probably know how to solve it technically, but they need management approval to do it and there are two managers currently in an internal feud over who has the highest authority and neither wants to admit to being the lowly one for such a trivial request.
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You're making ME feel old. I remember having to go over my friend's house to play multiplayer.
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My guess is, like 90% of businesses, they have multiple backups, set up monitoring for when a backup job fails, store them on redundant disks in different locations, dutifully write them on tape too, in addition to a copy in cloud storage, and have never ever tested restoring one.
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It annoys me that you can't even look at your trophies for games when PSN is down...
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I remember being so happy that outage happened because they gave away free games. That's how I got to play LittleBigPlanet for the first time.
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Nobody's gonna dispute the necessity of some sort of server somewhere in the mix. But does it need to be something like PSN? A central 3rd party service that most games only use because they're forced to?
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Being able to type in an IP address is a late 90s and early 2000s thing within the AAA space, much as I hate to say that. I do know of at least one unpopular, indie PS4 game that had IP address entry so it wasn’t outright banned then.
I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.
However, Sony does provide services that cost something to run, both directly for the studio, and indirectly for players who consume that studio’s game. Not the least of which includes account authentication which is one aspect of ensuring piracy isn’t happening on that platform. Friends services and the ability to join friends helps people jump back into your game. I’m sure there’s more.
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To be clear, that was not a thing. Just the PSN account doesn't require payment. The subscription is for playing in MP and (I think) access to online media like yt.
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I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.
It sounds like that requirement is just a bad deal for the consumer. And they charge you for it. And they can't guarantee uptime.
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Walled gardens and all. That’s the cost of doing business on PlayStation. Perhaps we’ll see some pushback from developers to PlayStation that might carve a path for sidestepping PSN services if the developer wants to.
It’s important to note, though, that PSN (and Xbox Live, and Steam) does provide useful services to developers in exchange for that cost of doing business.
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Or there is a completely different issue causing this and restoring would do nothing.
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Yes, and I'm also telling you we'll get no free games this time. Business is more of a "fuck you" attitude in 2025.
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From the consumer’s perspective, at its cheapest, it’s $10/month to play with your friends on PlayStation, be able to claim new games monthly which are good for as long as you are paying the subscription, and have cloud saves (among a few other minor benefits).
No service can guarantee uptime, that’s just the reality of it. This is the largest PSN outage in 14 years. Most outages have not been this long or widespread.
Napkin math shows their uptime to be ~99.5% in the 18 years it’s been operational. Not that good nowadays, but not something you can’t sell to people.
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Cloud saves that are free on PC, and they don't block your access to transfer saves without it like consoles do. Playing online on PC is free, and we know exactly how to make it free on consoles, but they're not interested in doing so. No one can guarantee 100% uptime, which is why it's a bad deal to make the subscription for that stuff mandatory instead of allowing things like direct IP connections.
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You apparently can transfer saves on PS4/5 offline. For PS4 they can be copied to a USB drive, but more to your point here, the only way to copy PS5 saves around (besides PS+) are to do console backup and restore processes and then during that process say you want to take save games wholesale (and then restore them wholesale). That’s definitely greedy bullshit.
I don’t know what more to say, consoles are walled gardens that consumers pay to be in. Within those walled gardens, the company dictates the rules. There’s plenty of good arguments for using a more open platform like PC. Not the least of which is that PlayStation has had an abysmal console cycle for trying to prove their console is worth purchasing - what with it having basically no exclusives that won’t eventually come to PC, first-party or otherwise.
