PlayStation Network up and running after users reported connectivity issues and 'under maintenance' errors

Sony's PlayStation Network (PSN) is mostly up and running after experiencing an intermittent outage that left users unable to log in and play any games that require online access. Irate gamers soon took to social media to voice their frustration over Soný's online gaming service's connectivity issues and 'under maintenance' errors.

Sony acknowledged the issues on its status page and its social media channels.

"You may have some difficulty launching games, applications, or online features," the company wrote. "Our engineers are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, and we thank you for your patience."

Besides making it impossible to sign in or create an account on the network, the outage prevented users, including those from the US, the UK and Australia, from launching games, apps, video content and accessing most services.

Gamers were also unable to boot up online multiplayer games, such as Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and Destiny, and caused yet another interruption for publisher EA's highly-anticipated open beta for its upcoming World War 1 shooter Battlefield 1.

Although Sony has not specified the cause of the outage, the infamous hacker group Poodlecorp commented on the interruption, but did not claim direct responsibility for it.

"While PSN has downtime stresser.poodlecorp.org has 100% uptime," the group tweeted.

Last month, the PlayStation Network suffered another outage that left users unable to log into their accounts and access online games, applications and other features. Earlier in August, Poodlecorp took credit for the PSN going offline after allegedly launching a slew of DDoS attacks. The same group also claimed to have taken down Niantic's Pokémon Go servers, Blizzard's Battle.net servers, GTA Online servers and most recently, EA's online servers.

On Christmas 2014, hacking collective Lizard Squad hit both Sony's PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live with a series of massive DDoS attacks to cripple the networks during the holiday season.