PSN: Sony hints at PlayStation Plus and PS Now subscription extensions following outage

Sony is looking into extending the subscriptions of PS Plus and PS Now users following the first PlayStation Network (PSN) outage of 2016, which occurred last night (Monday 4 January 2016). The downtime lasted just a few hours, but enraged PS4 players, who need PSN up and running to play games online and use other features.

Sony acknowledged the problem quickly, stating that they had "engineers working to resolve the issue as soon as possible". The outage has passed, but in the early hours of this morning (5 January) PlayStation posted on its Twitter account: "Thanks for your patience today – stay tuned for details on PS Plus, PS Now, and video rental extensions."

The outage lasted around 12 hours, so Sony is unlikely to extend memberships by more than a day. Vice discovered that the outage is said to be worth around the same as five British pence, considering the average cost of a monthly subscription amounts to the equivalent of £3.33. So if Sony were to offer compensation, it would be above and beyond what is legally required.

That said, plenty of fans were still making demands during the outage. One user on Twitter wanted an awful lot more than an extension, saying: "I think as compensation for Plus members we should get to freely choose 2 games of our liking." Another, which was retweeted more than 1,500 times, said: "If you think PlayStation should give us free PSN cards for this unknown maintenance, retweet so they can hear us."

PSN experienced some problems over the busy Christmas period, but nothing to match the widespread problems that occurred in 2014 on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

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