PSN having outages as new PS4 owners log on
Firmware update puts strain on US and Canadian network
Sony's PlayStation Network has shown signs of strain in the US and Canada as thousands of new PS4 owners logged on to download a firmware update and get their first taste of the new console.
As the system was launched at midnight last night across North America, users reported seeing the error numbers NW-31453-6 or NP-3500-8, accompanied by the message "The network connection has been lost."
Traffic is expected to increase as more and more customers bring the machine home during regular shopping hours. Although the system automatically begins downloading the firmware 1.50 in the background as soon as it is connected, users are also able to download the patch from PlayStation.com to a USB key and update the machine that way, instead. If that fails, customers are able to contact Sony as a last resort and request a Blu-ray containing the necessary information.
As I said earlier, Sony have known for a long time now roughly how many consoles would be trying to download the system update (at least) on launch day, as the initial stock pretty much sold out on pre-orders in many countries. So if they did fail to provide enough servers and bandwidth to handle that load, it would be pretty poor planning on their behalf.
It doesn't sound to me though like this is another failure on the scale of Sim City, and at least people can play retail games offline while the patch downloads in the background where there are network issues (although I've seen plenty of comments from people who claim to have downloaded the entire 300Mb system update within 5-10 minutes, so take from that what you will).
Edited 1 times. Last edit by John Bye on 16th November 2013 11:19pm
@Paul: the problem is who wants to be THAT guy or gal who pre-orders a game months in advance... but can't play it online (or off in some cases) on the day its launched because you kind of have a day job or something to do during the day and maybe can't or don't want to leave that console on all day trying to connect to a network?
Granted, you can go "play another game" or something, but that shouldn't be the first big solution to what USED to be a "go to the store, get disc, go home, PLAY" deal. Those "old" days will be pretty warmly recalled by some folks (especially when it took a few hours LESS to do that and you got some decent exercise walking to and from the store)...
Unsurprisingly they did actually did anticipate this being a problem, hence this: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/438109/us-ps4-firmware-update-150-available-now/
"The file is available for download now via the official US PlayStation website (PS4 support is yet to go live on the EU site). Since it's not unlikely that Sony's servers may struggle with the demand of a million updating PS4s on launch day this Friday, we advise you download the update now and install it to PS4 via USB memory stick."
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Christian Slater on 18th November 2013 10:48am
However, connexion problems occured a lot whatever I was on bf4 or watching broadcasts. Don't know if it was because of the traffic or because of the WIFI at home, but this was the first time I was experiencing this while playing.