The Holidays are often pretty hard on networks and the PlayStation Network is not new to trouble during the Christmas period. This time around, though, the issues did not affect the whole service, but Sony’s recently-released racing game Gran Turismo Sport.
A long downtime of the servers has affected users since earlier today, made worse by the fact that most of the game’s features rely on connectivity to even work.
A few hours ago, According to Producer Kazunori Yamauchi, recovery has begun by the hand of the PlayStation Network team in North America. Apparently, the issue was that the PSN detected a large volume of traffic from many Gran Turismo Sport users as an attack on the network itself.
Luckily, now the servers are back online, and we can resume racing as usual.
Apparently, the Christmas period alongside the recent patch that finally implemented the single-player GT League encouraged a large number of people to play the game, enough to trigger a reaction from the network.
Incidentally, since today is Christmas, you can see one of the new seasonal scapes at the top of the post. It’s Roppongi Hills in Tokyo, and I believe the shot was taken last year since I was there and I recognize the decorations.