PlayStation’s Weirdest Program Has Been Mysteriously Broken For Longer Than The 2011 PSN Outage [Update: It’s Fixed]

PlayStation Stars is one of Sony’s most bizarre initiatives in the PlayStation 5 era. The program lets you earn coins you can use to buy games on PSN, as well as collect virtual figurines that can only be viewed inside of the PlayStation app. And the whole thing has been broken since the beginning of June.

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If you’re a normal person, you’re probably wondering what the hell PlayStation Stars even is. Assuming you forgot or were never aware to begin with, like seemingly most PlayStation players at this point, the program was an overhaul of PlayStation Rewards that launched back in 2022. Players could get coins for buying games or completing “campaigns” that challenged them to play certain types of games in exchange for bespoke collectibles. These would be added to a virtual book shelf that ranged from callbacks to the platform’s history to branded cross-overs like Spider-Man Adidas.

Still, it’s a nice way to earn cash back that eventually adds up. We first started noticing issues around June 6, when PlayStation Stars, accessed via small icon on the home screen of the PlayStation mobile app, wouldn’t open. Instead, players were greeted by an error message: “PlayStation Stars is currently experiencing issues. Our engineers are aware of the issue and working on a solution.”

The timing was especially odd, since Sony was running a bunch of PlayStation Stars promotions alongside its mid-year Play Days sale event. This meant there were certain collectibles and awards that could only be earned by purchasing and playing certain games during the event. According to PlayStation Support, users would continue to accrue points and collectibles even while the program was down, though they wouldn’t be able to see any of it, let alone track what was still incomplete.

25 days later, the program is still broken. As users on the PlayStation Stars subreddit have been predicting, that puts it beyond the 23 day outage that PSN infamously suffered back in 2011 following an unprecedented hack. During that period, PS3 players were unable to play games online, buy them digitally, or use any of the console’s social features. Once service was restored, Sony apologized by giving players free games and a month of PS Plus on the house.

PlayStation Stars wasn’t hacked, doesn’t cost money, and is used by far fewer people, so its outage is hardly a scandal in the scheme of things. It’s just very strange, and Sony hasn’t yet clarified what exactly the problem is nor when the rewards program will be back up and running. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Update 7/2/2024 12:39 p.m. ET: And just as mysteriously as it went down, service for PlayStation Stars is beginning to return across several countries and regions. “PlayStation Stars will be returning soon in phased regional rollouts,” an update on the PlayStation website reads. “Thank you for your patience and we look forward to welcoming you back.”

It’s still not clear why the service went down in the first place or what Sony was finally able to fix. Time to see if everyone’s rewards and collectibles are where they left them and if PlayStation Stars will be issuing any make-goods to commemorate the occasion.

Update 7/12/2024 1:20 p.m. ET: PlayStation Stars is finally working again in the U.S. over a month after it originally went offline. After checking back daily to see point totals and their collections of virtual tchotchkes.

Still no word on why it went down or why it took so long to fix. Unfortunately, some players are still reporting borked point totals following the outage.

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