A PlayStation Network outage paralyzed thousands of players on Friday.

Sony's online network experienced a service interruption on Friday, preventing tens of thousands of gamers worldwide from launching their games, applications, or online features. The situation was resolved later that evening.

For several hours this Friday, the PlayStation Network was inaccessible for a large number of users worldwide. According to Down Detector, a platform that monitors outages in real time, tens of thousands of reports flooded in globally. Sony confirmed on its official status page that all affected services were back online by late Friday evening.

The outage coincided with an alert issued by Amazon Web Services reporting problems on some of its servers, an incident that was also resolved later that day. Sony has not officially established a link between the two events.

The incident has reignited criticism of Sony's digital strategy. The Japanese manufacturer announced this month, in a blog post, that new PlayStation games will no longer be sold on physical media starting in January 2028. Titles will remain available in stores, but only as download codes.

On the social network X, one user summed up the frustration of many gamers: "I can't launch my digital games until you fix this. Yet, I can put in my disc and play. The 100% digital future is truly wonderful." This reaction illustrates the concerns of a segment of the community, which fears losing all autonomy in the event of server failure.

Sony had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication of this article.