MANY PlayStation gamers are still unable to grab freebies and loyalty points as a record-breaking blackout continues.
PlayStation Stars has been broken for almost four full weeks now, beating the record of the 2011 PSN outage, but it seems the loyalty scheme is starting to come back.
As fans were losing hope, fearing that the service was gone for good, this morning, redditors from some regions reported that PS Stars is available again.
PlayStation’s official website now states that “PlayStation Stars will be returning soon in phased regional rollouts.”
The error screen within the PS App has also been updated to display the same message, as Sony is finally fixing the month-long outage.
Although there are no details about which regions will get the service back first, many Reddit users from Asia are happily reporting that PS Stars is back online for them.
It seems that players from Hong Kong, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Taiwan are among the first to have the service re-enabled.
If the regional rollout follows a similar pattern to what we’ve seen with other PlayStation products and services, North and South America should be next, followed by Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
Over the last week of the outage, players were still worried about missing out on collectibles and fearful that their PS Store purchases of PS4 and PS5 games weren’t earning them Stars points during the blackout.
As we were able to verify by downloading our personal data from the PS App, store purchases were still recorded, and Stars points were tracked correctly.
For example, we purchased Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition on launch day during the blackout, and the correct amount of PS Stars points was recorded in PlayStation’s back end.
Of course, to earn points on every PlayStation Store purchase instead of just from specific campaigns, players need to be subscribed to PS Plus.
A week ago, PlayStation apologised again for the outage and offered free Astro Bot avatars, which players can still claim today.
Then, the console maker said it would share more information on how to redeem the Days of Play Community Celebration Digital Collectible as soon as it’s available, without giving deadlines.
Many players missed this collectible because of the outage, so now that PlayStation Stars is coming back, we will likely hear more about it soon.
The first reports of the PS Stars outage appeared on June 6, meaning that the loyalty scheme has been down for 26 days.
The previous major outage, which affected all of Sony’s PlayStation services, was in 2011, and lasted for 24 days, or three weeks and three days, following a hacker attack.
The 2011 outage is still notorious, as it involved a data breach that compromised around 77million PSN accounts.
The exact reasons for the current blackout, which is limited just to the PS Stars programme, are still unknown.
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