PlayStation Network: PSN Goes Down Again Due To ‘Heavy Traffic’

The Sony Corporation’s PlayStation Network (PSN), is down as of Tuesday evening. Gamers first began reporting the outage online at 6 p.m. EST on Twitter.

Sony announced that PSN was back up at 10 p.m. EST with intermittent issues due to “heavy traffic.” The issue -- known as “latency” or lag during an online match -- later escalated to another outage. Sony’s PSN support page states that the network is “OFFLINE” as of 12 a.m. EST.

Update: Many media reports were updated to state that the PSN was back online following the PlayStation support Twitter acccount's claim at 9:34 p.m. EST that the "connectivity issues... have been resolved." International Business Times confirmed that the issues instead lasted for several more hours, until after 4:00 a.m. EST.

Sony will also take the PSN down for four hours on Thursday, Jan. 15, for "scheduled maintenance," but says gamers already signed into their accounts will not be logged out. The latest PSN outage follows a string of similar high-profile issues with Sony’s gaming network.

PSN was taken down along with Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox Live on Christmas Day by hackers calling themselves the Lizard Squad. Microsoft was able to restore service to owners of its Xbox One and Xbox 360 hours after Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom “paid” hackers a ransom because he wanted to play “Destiny.” Sony took more than a day longer to repair PSN, but later extended gamers’ subscriptions for five days as compensation for the outage.