Sony's PSN goes down again just before big PlayStation Meeting

Sony's PlayStation Network (PSN) has had its second outage in less than two weeks, causing widespread connectivity issues and leaving gamers unable to log in to the online gaming service.

PlayStation 4 owners first began reporting issues signing into their accounts on consoles, but others soon noticed problems with other PSN services: booting into games and accessing video services such as Netflix and PlayStation Vue.

The company soon took to Twitter to confirm the outage on its official support channel. "We're aware that users are experiencing issues logging into PSN," the company wrote. "Thanks for your patience as we investigate."

Sony also updated its status page to show multiple aspects of PSN affected, including account management, gaming and social, PlayStation Now and PlayStation Vue, affecting users on PS4, PS3 and Vita.

Sony has not officially specified a reason for PSN being offline.

"You may have some difficulty signing in or creating an account on PlayStation Network," the message read. "Our engineers are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, and we thank you for your patience."

The outage comes just before Sony's big PlayStation Meeting press conference being held later today (7 September) in New York, at which the Japanese tech giant is expected to showcase new hardware, including the much-talked about PlayStation Neo and slimline PS4. The outage also occurred on the same day as the launch of the fourth and final Black Ops 3's Salvation DLC as well.

At the time of publication, Sony's PSN Status page shows that all services are currently back up and running.

This latest outage comes on the heels of another that hit the network on 1 September. That outage made it impossible for gamers to boot up online multiplayer games and interrupted the open beta of EA's World War 1 shooter Battlefield 1's, which went live on 31 August. Prior to that, PSN also went offline on 26 August.