PSN has a history of going down randomly and spontaneously, and that hasn’t changed over the last few years, even in the face of Sony now charging money for the service, and the prices being charged in fact going up. Which brings us to: today. Today, PSN is apparently down again. Users began to experience problems with the service earlier this afternoon, and Sony’s PSN status page itself now notes that there is an outage affecting parts of the service.
You may experience incredibly long loading times, or you may experience an inability to log in (especially on accounts with 2FA activated), to access the PSN Store, or to play online. PS Now, PS Music, and PS Video are all unaffected by this, however. Basically, if you want to play, say, Black Ops 4 or Destiny 2: Forsaken, well, you may not be able to (though online play itself is unaffected, per Sony’s page). Now is as good an excuse as any to try and dig into Dragon Quest 11- or any a game that doesn’t require online and deserves all of your attention.
We’ll keep you posted on when the service is back online. But given that Sony recently said that it wants to aggressively promote its PSN business, I really hope that it gets better at keeping the darn service up.