Here's Why The PlayStation Network Is Having Problems Today

If you've been having trouble accessing the internet today and you've been wasting hours trying to access certain websites it's because of a nationwide denial of service attack, and the PlayStation Network was one of the services that went down.

Gamespot is reporting that the issues have been happening throughout the early morning and have persisted into the afternoon. The issue centers around a DDoS attack on the Dyn internet domain service, and due to the attack on those servers a whole bunch of other services have gone down as a result, including the PlayStation Network.

At first, PSN gamers were ready to take their complaints to Sony when the service went down during their multiplayer gaming sessions. Keep in mind that a big game this week has dropped, and I'm talking about Battlefield 1 for PS4, PC and Xbox One. Not being able to log in and play one of the most popular games this fall season over a very important launch weekend is definitely going to hurt EA and DICE.

Xbox One and PC gamers haven't reported issues with services like Steam or Xbox Live, which is a good thing. However, there's still the matter of other important web services not being made available. After PSN gamers recognized that they couldn't access their online accounts, many went to go to Twitter to complain about it to the PlayStation customer support account only to find that they couldn't access Twitter. The DDoS attack on Dyn knocked out a lot of service access for internet users in the United States on the east coast, resulting in services like Twitter being inaccessible.

So not only could PS3, PS4 and PS Vita users not use PSN, they also couldn't use Twitter to complain about not being able to use PSN.

Certain functions of Google are also affected, limiting access to some image searches and websites, and Paypal is also down so if you were planning on using your cash to buy an Xbox One or Xbox Live Gold so you could keep gaming over the weekend on a service that's actually still functional, you'll need to find an alternate monetary source to use in order to enact that plan.

Gamespot updated their article to report that the issue is so bad that Homeland Security is actually investigating the matter.

If you're still trying to play your games online via PSN, you may have to find an alternative for now. On the upside, if you have a Wii U, an Xbox One or a decent gaming PC, you can still access things like the Nintendo Network, Xbox Live, and even Battle.net, so if you have Overwatch or Splatoon or Halo or Gears of War 4, you might want to take some time out and put some energy into another gaming system where the online component is still up and active.

They don't give any kind of ETA on how long the Dyn domain services will be affected nor are there any details on who claimed responsibility for the attack, but this is definitely a lot bigger and a lot more coordinated than the small scale stuff pulled off by rogue groups like the Lizard Squad.