If you woke up recently to find that Sony has “permanently suspended” your PlayStation account for no apparent reason, just know you’re not alone. Sony has kicked an unknown number of PlayStation IDs off its platforms, ostensibly for violating the company’s terms of service. Players claim they haven’t done anything that would necessitate booting them off Sony’s services, and some also claim they’ve had their accounts restored. Still, so far the company has yet to make any official response.
Players took to forums such as ResetEra and to Twitter to share their suspensions and question why the company isn’t accepting appeals. Banned users say they haven’t posted any lewd or insulting messages online or had any chargeback on their accounts. One user claimed they received a message back from PlayStation saying “fraud was detected in the account,” but would not provide details past that. The news was first reported by The Verge Monday, also mentioning some players who told them they lost their accounts said they had them reinstated overnight.
Twitter is awash with users who all claim they logged in in the last few days only to find Sony had squashed their accounts. One user claimed they don’t normally interact with anybody save friends on their PlayStation, but was told: “We cannot provide further commentary with regards to this case.” Another player claimed the only actions they took online recently were to purchase Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Hogwarts Legacy. Others pleaded that they had only played games on their console a few times in the past month. One player said they hadn’t even been using their PlayStation as of late.
Pretty much all the complaints note how Sony’s customer service was not responding to players, and neither the official PlayStation or Ask PlayStation support Twitter profiles have yet to post any kind of update.
Gizmodo was not able to independently verify all the separate claims of unnecessary bans, and checking our own accounts we didn’t find ourselves placed on PlayStation’s rather opaque naughty list. We reached out to Sony for comment, and we will update this post if we hear back.
It hasn’t been a good week to be a PlayStation player if you own a lot of content through Sony’s services. VGC reported Monday that the PlayStation Store excised itself of more than 1,300 seasons of Discovery TV content and had even yoinked the shows off users’ accounts without any mention of a refund. An update on Sony’s legal page mentions this is due to “our content licensing arrangements with content providers.”
Update 12/05/23 at 12:08 p.m. ET: This post was updated to mention that some players claim they have had their accounts reinstated.
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