The PlayStation Network down detector has been a great source over the years for recognizing when the PSN is suffering server issues, often before they’ve been flagged up by Sony.
PSN vs Xbox Live – which network is the most reliable?
With the owner sitting on some interesting data gathered over many months from PS4 and Xbox One, we got in touch to ask if they could provide some solid information on the state of the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live (from the perspective of his users) to see which online gaming service was offline the most. The results are very interesting.
The PSN and Xbox Live data covers the period November 1, 2015 to September 19, 2016, and shows us exactly which days both the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live were affected by reported server issues, and what ‘down detector’ describes as a “major outage.”
The results are extremely close between both Sony and Microsoft’s consoles, though it’s the PS4 that has suffered the most server problems between that period—but only just.
PlayStation Network offline every 16 days
“As the data indicates, PSN users witnessed major problems on 20 days (out of 319 days makes for one major problem every 16 days),” Tom Sanders told PlayStation Universe in an exclusive interview.
“Xbox Live users during the same period experience major problems on 19 days, or once every 16.8 days.”
Click graph to enlarge
How ‘down detector’ measures this data is by the amount of users reporting issues throughout the day via their website. If it spikes, there’s a problem, and the site allows users to flag out where that problem lies; such as whether it’s a sign-in issue, players are unable to access the PlayStation Store, or they can’t play multiplayer games.
The information revealed doesn’t necessarily mean that the PlayStation Network or Xbox Live were fully offline on those days, but does mean that at least one or more services were affected, causing a spike in reports from gamers.
What’s interesting though is that ‘down detector’s’ data conflicts with a recent data dump of PSN information relating to downtime, or ‘intermittent’ PlayStation Network issues, which suggested that the PSN was down around 40 times during the same period. Of course, this information could have been entirely fabricated, whereas the ‘down detector’ has solid information based on the response of users to the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live being down.
Either way, it looks like both Sony and Microsoft’s online services are as unreliable as each other!