As most of you who own a PS4 and tried getting online during Christmas would have noticed, the PSN was down. You couldn’t do much online like play online multiplayer, or open You Tube apps on your PS4.
Well, Sony has decided to make up for that outage by giving all Play Station Plus Members 5 days worth of free Play Station Plus subscription.
The outage that started somewhere around Christmas, was a result of DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attack on the PSN and X Box Live by a hacker’s group which go by the name of Lizards Squad. The outage lasted for couple of days, when both online services were completely down. Some users however, still had issues connecting online on their PS4 in the days after the outage.
Its still unclear why Lizards Squad hacked into Sony’s and Microsoft’s servers. But from what we know, the FBI are looking into it. So we will leave it at that.
The plans for the compensation were announced by Eric Lempel (VP of Sony Network Entertainment), on the North American and European PlayStation Blog.
“Since access to PlayStation Network was impacted during the holidays, we wanted to show our appreciation for your patience by offering all PlayStation Plus members that had an active membership or free trial on December 25th a membership extension of five days. The extension will be automatically applied, so no action is necessary to receive the extension.”
The members who don’t have a Play Station Plus subscription, will not be left out, and all of them will be receiving a 10% discount on one of their purchases, as described further in the blog.
“Sometime this month we will announce that for a limited time, we will be offering a 10 percent discount code good for a one-time discount off a total cart purchase in the PlayStation Store as a thank you to all PSN members. This discount can be used toward content available on PS Store including blockbuster new releases, award winning indie games, game add-ons and season passes, and an enormous selection of TV and Movies.”
Both PSN and XBox Live are now up and running. Its been a rough last few months for Sony as a company. A lot of their big non-released movies were leaked out, “The Interview” was not officially released in the U.S.A, the PS4 lost out to the X Box One for the first time in November, and then this DDOS attack.
Though its nice to see Sony continuing on with their positive PR message. They released “The Interview” for free online (even though it’s not available in India! WTF Sony!!!) and then offering 5 free days of service, and a 10% discount on purchases. Its not much but its something; and as we all know something goes a long way than nothing.