No doubt, PlayStation fans noticed that the PS Network had been down for close to 16 hours at the time of writing. While waiting for Sony to fix the server and issue an official statement, console owners are now left wandering. Does Xbox Live or Game Pass actually have better server infrastructure to mitigate outages? Or PlayStation’s PSN is the best we have despite hours of outage? Well, we have a rather unscientific answer that might satisfy your curiosity.
According to our quick research, when it comes to server outages, Sony’s PSN is the reigning champ. Clocking in at over 29 days of total downtime from 2011 to 2025. The infamous 2011 PSN hack holds the crown with a jaw-dropping 23-day blackout, complete with leaked player data for extra chaos. Ouch.
Of course, despite starting the whole paid online subscription trend, Xbox Live isn’t much better. At 19 days, it’s at least slightly more reliable, though.
For services players pay for, you’d think both would manage to keep the lights on. But hey, who needs consistent servers when you can have ‘free’ monthly games you never touch?
It’s pretty hard to keep track of all server issues that have happened throughout the years. Nevertheless, these are all currently known and well-documented cases of PSN and Xbox Live console outages:
- 2007-2008 (Xbox): Between December 2007 and January 2008, Xbox Live faced an outage lasting approximately 14 days.
- 2011 (PlayStation): PSN was hacked between April 17 and April 19 where Sony was forced to deactivate the servers on April 20 for 23 days. 77 million accounts were compromised, and Sony offered a free 30-day membership of PSN and a couple of free games as compensation.
- 2014 (PlayStation and Xbox): Lizard Squad hacker group launched a DDoS Attack on both platforms during Christmas, disrupting them for around 5 days.
- 2017 (Xbox): Between March 21-22, Microsoft Azure’s cloud servers suffered a global outage, impacting Xbox Live connectivity for 2 hours.
- 2018 (Xbox): Xbox Live services were down for around 3 hours on November 6, due to Core Services issues.
- 2019 (PlayStation): PSN suffered a global outage around 4 hours on August 8.
- 2020 (PlayStation and Xbox): On May 15, Xbox Live and PSN experienced an approximately two-hour outage.
- 2021 (Xbox): On March 15, Xbox Live and Microsoft Teams users reported the services went down for more than 2 hours.
- 2024 (PlayStation): On October 1st, PSN had a global outage lasting 10 hours.
- 2025 (PlayStation): On February 8, 2025, PSN experienced a 16-hour outage — as of writing.
So yeah, that’s 704 documented service outages for PSN vs 465 hours for Xbox Live. That’s 10 days of whether your console can play and install games or not. Maybe it’s time for some of that subscription cash to go toward stable servers. Players deserve better, or at the very least, faster fixes and explanations.
