PlayStation Network Coming Back Up; Sony Posts Restoration FAQ

In what’s sure to be a major relief to devout PlayStation gamers everywhere, Sony has finally begun bringing up the bulk of its online PSN service, one piece at a time. There have been a couple of issues that have prevented the service from remaining up since the original restoration, but as it appears now, the service is once again stable.

As of the time of writing, the services that do work include multiplayer gaming, your friends list, access to services such as Netflix and Hulu, leaderboards and PlayStation Home. The big thing that remains down is the PlayStation Store, which houses all of the demos, full games, themes and et cetera.

To help fill people in on what the company is working on right now, and also how the rest of the service will be rolled out, Sony’s Social Media Manager Jeff Rubenstein has made a FAQ blog post that lays it all out. One of the bigger questions, regarding content releases that couldn’t occur during the downtime, has also been tackled.

As any serious PlayStation gamer is aware, Sony posts an “Update Tuesday” each week where updates of all sorts are released to the world, from demos to full games to PSone classics to themes and beyond. Since the initial downtime, gamers have missed out on three of these weekly updates, but the company doesn’t plan to rest on its laurels. Rather, content releases that have been forcibly skipped will be rolled out in an accelerated manner, with Sony doing multiple updates each week until it’s all caught up.

In other less-exciting news, Sony has also stated that its Welcome Back offer, and also news of its credit protection plan is still to come. Understandably, there’s no doubt a lot to consider and handle prior to rolling out plans that affects consumer financial data. Still, hopefully it won’t take too much longer before we learn more of those plans.

To date, three Tuesday publishes were missed, which included items like Under Siege and the MotorStorm Apocalypse demo. Rest assured that you won’t miss any of this great content. To catch up on the large amount of material, we’ll be publishing to the PlayStation Store multiple times per week once commerce functionality is restored. We will update the PlayStation.Blog with information on timing of the Store restoration, as well as the full list of new content as each publish occurs.