Friday night. The Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls open beta is live. Players fire up their PS5s, ready for what Sony has been marketing for weeks as a can’t-miss event. Except nothing cooperates. Digital games won’t launch. Sign-ins fail. The PlayStation Store is a ghost town. And Sony’s own status page? Everything green. All systems normal. Meanwhile, the company has already confirmed it’s ending physical disc releases for new PS5 titles starting January 2028. The familiar meme about not really owning your digital games stops being a meme when it’s happening on your console.
A Bad Month That Keeps Getting Worse
PSN has documented multiple outages in 2026 alone, and Sony still hasn’t explained why any of them happened.
Services started failing around 8:30 a.m. Eastern on July 24, hitting account sign-ins, multiplayer, and digital game launches across PS5, PS4, PS3, and Vita. That follows at least five prior documented PSN failures this year — March 21, April 15–16, April 23, May 21, and June 21, according to incident tracking compiled by tech-insider.org. Sony’s status page reportedly showed all services as normal throughout, a pattern that has repeated across previous outages. As of initial reporting, Sony had not publicly acknowledged the problem.
The Marvel Tōkon beta was supposed to be a marketing win — a Sony-published, console-exclusive fighting game drawing a large player base for a free play weekend. Instead it became a stress test PSN apparently failed. One regional outlet speculated that beta traffic may have contributed to the load, though that connection remains unconfirmed. “Pretty much everything related to PSN” went dark during a prior major outage, according to GameSpot — and this incident followed that same template.
The Disc Controversy Makes This Sting Harder
Sony’s plan to end new PS5 disc releases from January 2028 collides directly with a network that keeps proving its critics right.
Sony’s disc phase-out announcement triggered petitions and fierce backlash across social media and livestream comment sections. Critics made a straightforward argument: digital-only means your library lives or dies with Sony’s servers. A disc-based game plays offline. A digital license that can’t reach a validation server is a paperweight. Today’s outage is that argument running live.
PS Plus subscribers paying up to roughly $160 a year absorbed four outages in a 90-day span with no compensation and no detailed explanation, according to TechTimes. After a February 2025 outage lasting nearly 24 hours, Sony offered Plus members a five-day extension and cited an unspecified “operational issue,” per Reuters — still without disclosing root cause or infrastructure details. If Sony wants its all-digital future to feel like progress rather than a liability, the network has to actually work before the last disc disappears.
