New Delhi, July 25 -- LONDON - A player on Friday evening sat down to launch a game they had bought, downloaded, and owned - or believed they owned - and found it would not open. The PlayStation Network was down, and without a connection to Sony's authorization servers, a digital library meant nothing.

The outage hit PlayStation Network on Friday, stranding tens of thousands of users globally according to Down Detector, the service that aggregates outage reports. Reports flooded in from players across North America, Europe and Asia who found themselves unable to access online multiplayer, launch digital titles, or use PlayStation applications. The disruption affected both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles, cutting across console g...