After resolving a prolonged PlayStation Network outage, Sony promises to lengthen players' subscriptions to its PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now services.

According to Sony, the PSN's experience of network issues across all platforms on Monday won't affect the balances on fans' subscriptions to the company's myriad services. After users were prohibited from playing games relying on server connections for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PS Vita for roughly 10 hours, Sony has promised to extend fans' subscriptions to PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now, as well as increase the rental periods for movies and TV as compensation.

Once PSN was back online late last night, Sony took to its official PlayStation Twitter account in order to apologize for the incident, thank users for their patience, and confirm the extensions of fans' subscriptions. The company's full tweet on the issue can be seen below.

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As of writing, it's still unclear as to how long Sony will extend PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now subscriptions. The company may very well offer recompense similar to the deal given after 2014's infamous outage when PSN servers suffered from a Christmas attack by the hacker collective Lizard Squad, which led to Sony lengthening fans' PlayStation-related subscriptions for 5 extra days.

Although PSN is up and running once again, Sony has yet to officially release a public statement on what exactly caused the servers to fail. With that being the case, one plausible explanation could be the delayed result of hackers' threats to take down PlayStation Network on Christmas 2015, which didn't happen explicitly on the day. Nevertheless, the group known as Phantom Squad has gone on record to say that it was definitely behind yesterday's network failure.

Whatever the actual cause of the recent blackout may be, surely everyone can agree — save for the hackers — that no one wins when a service as widely used as the PlayStation Network goes down. Such an occurrence not only locks people out of a platform that they've paid for with their hard-earned money, but it also damages the relationship between Sony and its customers.

Sony's promise to reimburse fans for PSN's first outage of 2016 is definitely a move in the right direction as far as rectifying what happened goes, but it still needs to do far more to ensure network security and reduce the likelihood of unplanned maintenance in the future, especially since these circumstances have happened so frequently in the past. After all, when the company addressed the Better PlayStation Network campaign several months ago, it assured fans that steps had been taken to improve the servers, but it's almost as if Sony is playing the same song and dance year in and year out. As a matter of fact, with this situation being almost identical to the aforementioned PlayStation Plus extension for the holiday outage of 2014, it's starting to seem as if Sony isn't taking the proper precautions to protect its online services.

What do you think about Sony's offering to extend PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now subscriptions for yesterday's PSN outage? Did the network going down affect your confidence in the company? Let us know in the comments below.

There's no word as to when Sony will enact the extensions, or how much extra time fans will receive for their accounts.

Source: PlayStation – Twitter (via VG 24/7)