If you have not heard, Playstation Network and Sony Online have been restored to active status. However, because of the vast amount of gamers that were affected by the outage 
things are moving a bit slow. Sony is urging patience as you can imagine the heavy network strain and load that has been placed on the network when over 100 million of us beelined to our PS3 to get the firmware update and login to PSN again.
Patience is Key
We are all gamers living in the age of instant digital satisfaction. So when things slow down we start to get upset. But considering that the PSN was down for almost a month, it would be wise to just take things slow right now. After all, another 12 hours won’t kill you, now will it?
A recent Sony PSN blog noted that:
With the huge number of people coming back online at the same time and resetting their passwords, it is creating significant email traffic to ISPs. The consequence is that some of the ISPs are throttling the emails.
So after you submit your request and don’t get your email right away, you might be quick to blame Sony, when, in fact, it might not be their fault at all.
Our suggestion, after you’ve got the firmware updated, and you’ve put in your request, just go play a game for a while. The email queue is being cleared as fast as possible with the latest estimate from Sony sitting at 30 minutes for them to process requests they are receiving in high volume.
But even then, if your ISP is one of those that have throttled emails you might even wait an hour or more for it to get to you. So again, patience is the answer.
Top Ten Things to do While Waiting for your PSN Password Reset Email
- Play a Playstation 3 game (we’re playing Motorstorm Apocalypse and Navy SEALs Special Forces)
- Clean up your Playstation 3 hard drive space (there’s probably loads of stuff on there that you don’t need anymore, like old demos, etc - do a little spring cleaning on it)
- Grab your PSP and beat your high score on your favorite PS Mini (we recently we back to playing Paper Wars ourselves)
- Play an Xbox 360 game (we were playing Gears of War 3 bets but now it’s done...sniff, sniff back to Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood multiplayer). Of course, if you’re a PS only gamer, then you’re out of luck on this one.
- Play a PC game (really, you’ve got to have some games you can play online with your PC, right?)
- Watch an episode of your favorite TV show on Hulu or Netflix (maybe two depending on how long they are)
- Go outside and soak up the spring air and sun (we could all use a bit more Vitamin D in our lives I’m sure. No, it doesn’t work by sitting inside and peering out the window, you need direct sunlight to skin contact, really.)
- Have a chat with a friend or family member (they’ll be happy to hear from you)
- Clean your room/apartment/flat/office (if you’re like us at GDN, your gaming space is very often is total disarray).
- Read some stuff here at GDN (we might have something that you’ve missed recently, so take a break and catch up on what’s new).
There are probably a hundred other things we might suggest you do while waiting for that email, but really, you already know what they are.
It’s easy to lash out and blame Sony, after all, they did drop the ball on security in the first place which created this whole mess. But they are working hard to rectify everything and everyone will receive nearly double the time that was lost due to the outage in the Sony MMOs and other paid subscriptions as well as some extra games.
Now, please proceed in a calm and orderly fashion to your nearest game console, and have some fun... even if you haven’t received your PSN email yet, it’s surely on the way.
Working out the Glitches
As with all disasters, there will be glitches in the system and this is certainly going to happen here with the Sony networks. They have likely made large, sweeping changes, to a variety of things and systems that tie into the PSN, which is going to mean that there will definitely be some bugs to work out. We can most likely expect long support reply times, potential network lag, slow download speeds, quirky problems with key pieces of the system and more.
As suggested before, take it slow. Think of it as beta testing the new version of the Playstation Network. We’re doing stress and quality testing now for them and hopefully, things will be up and running smooth as can be in no time flat. Perhaps, even better than before.
