UPDATE – 12.15pm BST – Service slowly resuming for many users with reports that they can now sign-in.
UPDATE – 11.30am BST – A Sony spokesperson says that DO NOT know what has caused the issue but have their engineers working on it.
The PlayStation Network is currently offline worldwide, though no planned maintenance has been announced by Sony Computer Entertainment. Many users are reporting the “Cannot connect to server NW-31201-7” or “CE-34861-2” error on PS3 and PS4.
While some rumours are going around that the downtime could be due to Sony preparing for the next firmware update, others are suggesting that LizardSquad, who issued DDoS attacks on various game servers over the last few weeks, could be behind it.
We’ve contacted Sony for answers so will update you as soon as we hear anything. For now though, it looks like we’re playing our games offline. No Destiny for us then, but Shadow of Mordor should keep us busy.