PlayStation gamers urged to check and claim free PS Plus before it's gone

PlayStation gamers are being urged to check their emails and accounts for notifications from Sony regarding their free PlayStation Plus subscriptions, following reports from several users who have realised that they’ve already missed out.

Last month, PlayStation’s servers went down. The outage affected users from April 7 to April 8, essentially ruining most users' weekend plans of online gaming.

To apologise, Sony announced that users would be receiving five free days of PlayStation Plus. The free days would be automatically credited to PlayStation users’ accounts, extending pre-existing subscriptions by five days.

These free days have been slowly rolling out across the last month, with most users noticing that their subscriptions had been extended without any kind of prior warning from Sony.

However… what if your PlayStation Plus subscription was active during the outage, but ran out before Sony started automatically extending PS Plus users' active subscriptions?

Well, it works probably as you’d expect: users have just been automatically given a five-day subscription. Now I’m sure that would have been fine for most users… if Sony had bothered to warn them ahead of time.

In a thread over on the r/PlayStationPlus subreddit, several users are complaining that they’ve almost entirely missed out on their free PlayStation Plus subscriptions.

This is because Sony hasn’t chosen to notify them that their subscriptions were once again active ahead of time.

"Just got an email (27th march) saying my free days started on the 24th," user badman2791 stated in their post.

"Great so I've got one day left. Anyone else experience the same?"

"Same!" replied user urmamsellsseashellls.

"I'm so annoyed about the late notification. My subscription ended like 2 weeks ago."

Honestly I’ve written so many articles about the multitude of different ways that Sony has managed to screw up giving away something for free that I’m starting to think a lot of this is intentional.

It could just be a clerical error of sorts, and emails that were scheduled to go out ahead of time are simply going out later than planned.

But, given how poorly they’ve handled the situation, I’m not sure I can give Sony the benefit of the doubt here. They should have just sent these out as redeemable keys to use on the PlayStation Store.