If you were trying to connect to PlayStation Network, PSN, on the (UK time) evening of January 4 you might have experienced some problems. I was in this very situation, trying to get a game or two of Rocket League going before turning in. Figured my WiFi was on the blink again, so I reset it a few times. Nothing. (Remember when you simply blew on the cartridge to make the game work?) And then, a familiar notification: “PlayStation Network is currently undergoing maintenance.”

Nothing unusual about that. PlayStation was on the case.

You’d expect such an outage to last a few minutes. But an hour went by. Then two. Then came rumors that PSN would be down not for an evening, but potentially for a few days, until January 7.

And, boy, did some people lose their shit over that. What was causing this downtime? A hack, like the blackout of 2011? A DDoS attack, like the Lizard Squad-credited one that crippled the network ahead of Christmas 2014? Whatever the cause, the people, the players, immediately demanded recompense.

After a hacking back in 2011, PlayStation did indeed gift users free software or PS Plus membership. Eventually. And they also gave customers a little something after their late 2014 problems. So your Change.org petition probably isn’t necessary.

Besides, it’s all fixed now.

The “cost” to millions of PS Plus subscribers, for the time they couldn’t get online, amounts to something like 16 cents, based on the cost of a month totaling $9.99, there being 744 hours in January, and the outage lasting for about 12 hours. Sony is yet to confirm why PSN went down, but it doesn’t appear to be anything as potentially disastrous as the Steam attack of Christmas Day, which revealed thousands of users’ credit card and address details.

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