Sony promise 5 days extra PS Plus as compensation for PSN outage

thesixthaxis.com:

Following the remarkable 24 hours downtime for PlayStation Network on Saturday 8th February, Sony as issued an apology and announced compensation for PlayStation Plus members – everyone will have five days added to their current subscriptions.

Writing on a certain social media hellhole, Sony writes:

Network services have fully recovered from an operational issue. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank the community for their patience. All PlayStation Plus members will automatically receive an additional 5 days of service.

At this time Sony hasn’t actually issued an explanation for what caused the downtime. Naturally, given historical service outages, there’s speculation over whether this was an attempted hack, as in 2011, a brazen DDoS attack, as in December 2014, or something more mundane, like a backend update gone wrong.

5 days of extra PS Plus is decent recompense for subscribers, though it’s not exactly perfect. For one thing, it means that those playing free-to-play titles that don’t require PS Plus were also affected and seemingly won’t get any kind of love here.

Companies who were holding events and betas this weekend are also trying to adjust and make up for the lost time. Capcom is considering having an extra 24 hours for the Monster Hunter Wilds Open Beta Test 2, and we’ll see if Activision does similar for the current double XP event.

There’s also a bit of a knock on effect for frugal gamers that look to take advantage of sale periods, particularly around Black Friday. Letting your subscription lapse at the right time leaves you then able to grab another year on discount with a “new” customer promotion, which isn’t typically available to existing subscribers. 5 extra days being automatically added could knock a whole swathe of players out of the window to take advantage of these offers.

Anyway. It’s Sunday and PSN is live and kicking once again. Happy online gaming, everyone!