The PlayStation Network is slowly coming back online after a significant outage

The PlayStation Network is coming back online after an evening outage that left users unable to play some of their games for hours.

At the time of publishing this article, Sony's PSN service status page still showed warnings in the Account Management, Gaming and Social, PlayStation Video and PlayStation Store sections, with a general warning that “some services are experiencing issues.”

This PSN issue affected all currently supported PlayStation consoles (PS Vita, PS3, PS4, PS5) and other services that require PSN login.

The Japanese Twitter account Ask PlayStation said Sony was investigating and conducting recovery work. “We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused,” Sony said.

However, users are reporting that PSN is slowly coming back online, and IGN was able to log into PSN in the UK this morning.

The PSN outage once again poses problems as many single-player focused games do not allow true offline play. Does it play?, which tests commercial releases to ensure they work without internet, tweeted: “Good thing we have internet so we're not affected by offline services.” Oh wait, that's not how it works.

“Has anyone tried registering a removable drive? Does this still work?”

The outage comes amid Sony's admission that recent changes to the PS5 homescreen, which replaced unique video game graphics with annoying ads, were a “technical error.”

Wesley is the UK news editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].