8 hours later, PlayStation Network creeps back online after PS4 and PS5 players go without online multiplayer and more

Players are reporting that the PlayStation Network is finally starting to come back online after a lengthy eight-hour outage that has prevented users on PS5, PS4, and beyond from playing online multiplayer games.

For the last eight hours, people across the web, PS5, PS4, and even PS3 and Vita have been struggling with service outages across everything from the PlayStation Store to PlayStation Video, account management, and gaming itself. With the network down, online games were out of action, leaving players everywhere twiddling their thumbs. Communication was light on the ground, too – although the issues were acknowledged by the Japanese PlayStation customer support account on Twitter, no indication was given of when we could expect PSN to be back up.

Thankfully, though, it now sounds like the service is starting to be restored. More and more users on Twitter are reporting that things are back in action for them, although at the time of writing, that's not the case for everyone. In the UK, for example, the PSN Service Status site is still displaying the outage. According to Twitter user @geronimo_73_, at the very least, it appears to be back in the United States, Canada, and Japan, and there's no doubt we can expect that list to expand as time goes on.

It's been a rather rough 24 hours for PlayStation fans, as many PS5 users also recently reported their console home screens being filled with ads for various games, replacing the art you normally see when hovering over one of your owned games. Thankfully though, this was short lived – in a since-deleted tweet, PlayStation senior product manager Daniel Hiatt quickly confirmed it was "just a (new) bug with an existing feature," and now, it's been fixed.

While you're here, be sure to check out our roundup of everything we know about the PS5 Pro launching next month.