PlayStation Network Down and Out!

Picture from NewsToday article of PlayStation employee
working on network problem.

Anyone that plays videos games online, myself included, looks forward to turning on their video game counsel to play there favorite game online. After a long stressful day at school or work I look forward to coming home to play Call of Duty Black Ops online. Over the last three days however PlayStation users have not been able to play games online.

According to an April 24th article from newsgater.com by Matt Clark, the Sony PlayStation network has been down for three consecutive days. According to the article the network being down does not only effect those who want to play games online but also those who use the PlayStation network to stream video.

In a CNETNews.com article this is not the first time the PlayStation network has had an outage. At about the same time last year testing the patience of many users, but this problem was resolved in only day.  

To make matters worse, there is no clear timetable as to when the service will be back online, which is causing great frustration in the gamer community. The timing couldn't be any worse as the weekend approaches.

CNETNews also released a poll to find out PlayStation network users feel should be done to compensate for the long network outage (you can see the pole on the CNET site on the left side of the page). The poll has had 7,255 votes and 37% of users that voted said they deserve a free game from Sony. On the other hand 20%, including myself responded "Nothing! Outages happen." to the same poll. 

In a PCMAG.com article by David Murphy the shortage was on day four when Patrick Seybold, senior director of corporate communications and social media of Sony, wrote in his blog that Sony is taking this unexpected time to rebuild the PlayStation network infrastructure even better than before. The article goes on to later explain that even though there is no official time frame to have the network back up and running a source speaking to PlayStation Universe expects he network to be up in the U.S. on Tuesday.

With this weekend being Easter weekend I did not have many chances to play PlayStation so this outage did not affect me too much. If this outage had happened during the week however I would have gone crazy without being able to play online whenever I wanted. From time to time there are outages in the network and those can be annoying even though they last only a short period of time. It is hard to believe that in today's day in age that there can be an outage that lasts as long as this one has. I do like that PlayStation is taking this very long outage to correct and improve upon the current network that is in place.