PlayStation fans surprised with free download after outage

PlayStation Stars is back, sort of.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll likely know that PlayStation Stars has been down for a couple of weeks.

PlayStation’s free rewards service allows users to earn both digital collectibles and points via completing easy campaigns and through purchases made on the PlayStation Store for the latter.

Since the outage began though, users have been unable to track their points or access them to exchange points for free store credit.

Previously, a message on the PlayStation Stars segment of the app read, “PlayStation Stars is currently experiencing issues. Our engineers are aware of the issue and are working on a solution.”

If you visit the app now, however, it’ll instead state, “PlayStation Stars will be returning soon in phased regional rollouts. Thank you for your patience and we look forward to welcoming you back.”

It’s surprising that an error could wipe out the service for this long but whatever the problem was, it seems that Sony has finally gotten to the bottom of it.

Users in Asia have reported regaining access.

At the time of writing, I’m still unable to open PlayStation Stars here in the UK. The timing of the regional rollout remains unconfirmed.

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Those who have found their way back into the service have reported being met with a bonus freebie.

This pertains to those digital collectibles I mentioned earlier.

PlayStation Stars users should automatically acquire console-themed collectibles for the consoles they’ve owned that have been linked to that specific PlayStation Network account.

For example, if you previously owned a PlayStation 3, your PlayStation Stars account should give you that collectible but for many, these were previously missing.

Whatever Sony has done to fix PlayStation Stars, it appears that it’s also causing missing collectibles to now appear.

“Somehow I received the OG PS3 campaign after the downtime,” Reddit user Potential_Abalone_30 wrote.

“For context, my account is from 2015 and I did have an OG PS3 and a PS3 Slim activated.”

“I had the Slim and it just appeared on my list and said completed,” added another user.

“Here’s hoping I get the PS VR2 one that never showed for me,” wrote matt340uk.

If you do feel that you’re still missing a console collectible, I’d urge you to visit customer support who may be able to help.

It does appear though that many users are finding their collectibles have now successfully updated.