PlayStation Stars outage hits rough milestone for Sony
PlayStation Stars first went offline in June 2024 — Wednesday, June 5, 2024, to be precise. As of Monday, July 1, 2024, this means that PS Stars has been offline for 25 days, exceeding the 24-day outage of Sony’s infamous 2011 PSN hack.
For those who don’t recall the incident, Sony’s PSN was the target of a malicious network breach in 2011 that resulted in a third party accessing the private data of approximately 77 million accounts. PlayStation Network went offline on April 20, 2011, and eventually went online once more on May 14, 2011.
The PSN hack drew international concern and scrutiny towards Sony, particularly after the company delayed informing customers. The incident reportedly cost Sony $171 million and affected PSN users were offered compensation in the form of free digital games and a month’s worth of PS Plus membership.
While the PlayStation Stars outage is not likely to draw nearly so much scrutiny — particularly since the PlayStation Network has stayed online throughout the outage — it does mark a new milestone in the history of Sony’s online services. The loyalty scheme has been officially unavailable to subscribers for a longer period than the infamous PSN hack, yet no official statement explaining the outage has been issued yet.
via PS Blog in 2011.It should be noted that PlayStation Stars did still deliver an offline campaign reward via the PS App, so the backend of the loyalty scheme does seem to be functioning. However, the length of the service’s outage and the mixed messaging regarding whether subscribers have lost PS Stars points has continued to draw concern on social media.
We’ll continue to update readers on the status of Sony’s loyalty scheme, and as always we recommend subscribers use our PlayStation Stars guide to contact PlayStation Support if they have any concerns. What do you make of this latest PS Stars outage milestone? Let us know in the comments below. Our thanks to this Reddit user for drawing the comparison.