Before you Xbox fanboys (and girls) get your underwear in a bunch, we know you’re not switching, and that’s okay. The truth of the matter is that both systems (PlayStation and Xbox) have and no doubt will continue to have online issues. This October, 2015 saw an outage so significant that Phil Spencer, Xbox chief addressed the issue in response to a tweet from The Verge’s Tom Warren.
Now, thanks to Snoop, Xbox Live is back in the spotlight. While the outage seems to have been resolved, there’s no telling if – or rather when and where – the next one will surface. If it does, it might only affect online gameplay as some users reported with this outage, allowing Xbox owners to continue using system apps like Netflix and Hulu, at the very least.
PSN’s history has its own unfortunate moments. The April 20 curse affected the network with an extended outage in 2011. That was Anonymous’ “Operation Sony” retaliation for removing Linux and the jailbreak lawsuit against George Hotz, where hackers broke into SOE and PlayStation servers, snatching user data, including credit card info. Eventually Sony went to the FBI for help but PSN was down for nearly a month, from Hitler’s birthday until May 15, costing Sony over $170 million. The lost trust hasn’t been quantified; some PlayStation players still refuse to add credit card information to their accounts.
As a PlayStation loyalist myself, I noted PSN was down New Year’s Day. Reports spiked on January 4, with third party sites like Outage Report reflecting nearly 5,000 network-down reports from individual users. Sony recently assured PS Plus and PS Now users that it would extend their subscriptions as an apology for the starting the year off on a bad note.
Sony did offer five day PS plus membership extensions following their week-long Christmas outage in 2014 – the result of a Lizard Squad hack of both Sony and Microsoft that evolved into a lesson in cyber security from the Davids of the internet for the tech goliaths. Microsoft gave away a month of Gold by way of apology for an outage way back in 2012. Let’s see what they do this time around.
Going by the voluntarily reported numbers, PSN seems to have had more difficulties in 2015 than Xbox Live. The difference is that someone famous didn’t tell Sony off on Instagram.
