If you’re just settling in to some well-earned time off and hoping to get some GT Sport action, we’ve got a little bit of bad news.
Players all over the globe are reporting a prolonged outage of the game’s servers. This issue, flagged in the game as “NE-21194400”, prevents players from accessing any of the online services. Sadly, this includes the ability to save the game.
Polyphony Digital is aware of the ongoing issue, which seems to have started at around 1900 UTC on December 23, and has published the following statement:
Currently we are experiencing an unstable connection from the Gran Turismo Sport servers to the PlayStation Network servers.
Because of this, an error message is displayed notifying that the game cannot connect to the network.
For the time being, we have found that in some cases it is still possible to bypass the issue and connect to the server by ignoring the correction error messages and going to the top screen, then trying to manually “Reconnect to the Network” a few times.
Please wait while we investigate the cause of this issue together with the PlayStation Network.
We apologize for the inconvenience caused to our users.
Players will still be able to access the offline portions of the game, including the new GT League. However, until this is resolved they will not be able to save any progress made.
We’ve seen the NE-21194400 error twice before. The first was during the closed Beta in April and the second in October when the game launched. Interestingly, both covered a period when user numbers rapidly increased, suggesting a server load issue.
However, Kazunori Yamauchi has taken to Twitter to provide an explanation:
GT Sportは、起動時にＰＳＮに認証に行きます。今問題が起きているのはそこ。なぜかきちんと通らずにはじかれる。
もし、運良くそこをクリアできれば、あとはユーザーとGTサーバーだけの通信になるので、問題なくプレイできます。迷惑かけてごめん。— 山内 一典 / Kaz Yamauchi (@Kaz_Yamauchi) December 24, 2017
This roughly translates as:
At start-up, GT Sport authenticates with PSN. This problem is happening there. Somehow it is rejected without passing properly. If you can clear this stage, you will be able to communicate with the GT server, so you can play without problems. I am sorry for the trouble.
However, even those users who can get online may find themselves unable to save any progress.
It couldn’t come at a more inopportune time for GT Sport. The game itself is on sale in the PSN Store and thousands more users are likely to come online after finding the game or a PS4 bundle under the Christmas tree.
This should also be a time for great celebration, as the Gran Turismo series just turned 20 years old. Instead, Polyphony Digital is facing the wrath of hundreds of thousands of irate users.
We’ll keep you up to date with any information on this issue as we get it.
Featured images courtesy of okami11408 and PsuPepperoni.
See more articles on PlayStation Network.
