The PlayStation Network of Sony (PSN) once again bogged down on July 14, with gamers taking their frustrations to social media over yet another service interruption for the gaming network.
The downtime prevented gamers from accessing online games, the online store, the trophy system, and the apps and messages of users.
Sony said that PSN was down because of maintenance works. However, the company did not previously issue a warning for an expected downtime due to maintenance, which raises questions on the validity of the reason that Sony supplied for the service outage.
"You may be experiencing issues related to launching games, applications, and/or social features such as trophies, messaging, or friends list. We appreciate your patience while we address this," Sony confirmed in the status page of PSN.
Additional notices released by Sony confirmed that there were ongoing issues with the Playstation Store and the network's video unlimited service.
At the time of writing, the status page for PSN states that all the network's services are working fine. However, complaints regarding continuous service interruptions are still pouring in from users.
The worst downtime that PSN users experienced was back in 2011. The downtime lasted for 23 days, leading to information from 77 million accounts on the network to be compromised.
Last year, the notorious hacker group Lizard Squad claimed to have brought down PSN using a denial-of-service attack which caused service outages over the holiday season.
While the issues that gamers faced with PSN recently do not compare to these bigger problems, it should not be forgotten that the network is regularly experiencing such technical problems that has made it frustrating for users to play their favorite games on the online network.
In the month of July alone, PSN has already experienced a few other service downtimes before the one on July 14. There were separate downtimes that occurred daily from July 3 to July 5.
These issues are a big reason why Playstation users have launched the Better PSN initiative, which fields suggestions from fellow gamers on improvements that can be done to the gaming network.
In addition to wishes for Sony to eliminate the downtimes regularly experienced on PSN, other requested improvements to the network include uninterrupted play in multiplayer modes, enhancements to the user profile pages, increase in the cloud storage space and the release of additional customization tools.
Sony, however, has yet to acknowledge the Better PSN campaign through an official statement.
