PlayStation explains why PSN was down for so long, and fans aren't happy

Well done, my friends. We’ve made it through yet another PlayStation Network outage.

You may recall the dark days of the 2011 PSN outage which lasted for a whopping 23 days.

Fair to say, I think many of us spent much of this weekend fearful that history may be repeating itself.

Thankfully, this time around, PSN was only down for 24 hours.

I say “only”, of course, that’s still very bad news for users, but the outage paled in comparison to what many of us experienced in 2011.

If you’re completely unaware of what happened, PlayStation users were essentially unable to use all online services, whether that be accessing online games or downloading titles from the PlayStation Store, for example.

The network shut down on Friday 7 February, with services slowly restoring around 24 hours later on Saturday 8 February.

Now, PlayStation has taken to social media to explain exactly what happened.

PlayStation 5 users have Ghost of Yōtei to look forward to this year.

Unlike the 2011 outage which was caused by a hack, this latest version was due to an “operational issue”.

“Network services have fully recovered from an operational issue. We apologise for the inconvenience and thank the community for their patience,” the official AskPlayStation Twitter account wrote.

It added that all PlayStation Plus members would receive an additional five days of service as compensation.

That’s all well and good, but PlayStation failed to compensate those without PlayStation Plus.

Yes, PlayStation Plus is predominantly how you access the online services of most games but you don’t need it for games like Fortnite, for example.

Non-PlayStation Plus users also wouldn’t have been able to access titles on the PlayStation Store, so you do have to wonder why they’ve been excluded from this compensation.

“So non PS Plus get nothing,” wrote one disgruntled fan.

“Not good enough,” added another.

Of course, plenty of people were also upset about the company’s lack of communication during the outage.

That rumoured State of Play can’t come soon enough. PlayStation needs to distract its fans.