Polyphony Digital has added another round to the current Gran Turismo World Series Manufacturers Cup Exhibition season following a widespread PlayStation Network (PSN) outage over the weekend.
It likely didn’t escape your attention that PSN was having issues, beginning on Friday evening at around 2300 UTC and affecting what appears to have been a majority of the global playerbase. This is core game time for many players, kicking back for the weekend, as well as those practising for the GTWS exhibition rounds
The inability to connection to PSN became more than a blip however, running throughout much of Saturday until services finally started to come back around 1700 UTC on Saturday — though it took a little longer for everything to return to normal.
There were quite a few consequences to this issue, as even games downloaded from the PlayStation Store wouldn’t work because their licences could not be verified – not great news for players who’ve shifted over to what PlayStation terms “disc-free consoles“.
Titles requiring an online connection to even function, such as Gran Turismo 7, were effectively inaccessible. Players with a disc version of the title would have been able to access very limited portions of the game and not be able to save anything.
Those players in Europe hoping to take part in the second round of the GTWS Manufacturers Cup were very much out of luck, as the issue more or less precluded it due to covering almost all race start times. A quick scan of the various leagues reveals that around 10% of players could take part, with earlier Asia-Oceania and later Americas regions less affected.
With that in mind, PD has added a fifth round to the season with an identical set-up to the second round, featuring Gr.3 cars at the Daytona Road Course. The number of effective rounds remains the same, at the best three, so anyone who was able to take part and already has points will still see them included.
Separately, PlayStation has announced that all PS Plus subscribers across all tiers will receive an extra five days of the service for free to compensate for the approximately 18-hour outage — which ranks as the third-longest since the service began, behind two malicious attacks in 2014 and 2011.
As yet, there has been no statement from Sony or PlayStation regarding the causes or reasons for this latest prolonged downtime.
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