If you’re busy with work or school, the weekend is a brief oasis from the drudgery of daily life. However, for some PlayStation 4 owners, the last few days have been a nightmare as mysterious messages begin breaking perfectly good PlayStation consoles.
What started as heresy on the periphery of my own social media feeds appears to have had growing evidence to support the first few occurrences. Reports found across Reddit, suggest that PlayStation owners who open an unreadable message on their console will quickly find that their controllers and console become unstable, at best. There is no indication where the purported attacks are coming from and why people are being targeted right now, but the fallout does seem to be real. The resulting impact of these messages seems to require either a full factory reset or a less invasive rebuild in safe mode.
While PlayStation has not released any details the following tweet from Ask PlayStation UK does indicate that Sony is aware of the issue and that it is the real deal.
Hello! We are aware and investigating, but it doesn't reset your console to factory settings. All you need to do is delete the message via the PS messaging app, and use Option 5 in Safe Mode to sort your console out. Instructions: https://t.co/vecpA6wnaQ ^DB
— Ask PlayStation UK (@AskPS_UK) October 15, 2018
The best advice we can give PlayStation owners right now is to make sure you turn your messages off via your Sony account. You find details on how to do this, and the options to change your messaging settings, via the PlayStation site. If you already have one of these then you can delete it via the PlayStation Mobile app, available on iOS and Google Play store, or web interface. As soon as we get more concrete information we will let you know.
“Fix” Announced
A day after we posted this warning, it looks like Sony have released an official fix for the issue at hand. The Ask PlayStation UK Twitter team has released what I would describe as a workaround for anybody impacted. This information is not going to stop anybody from sending messages and it will certainly not stop you from receiving them. Still, at least Sony is aware of the issue. You can find the tweet below
We've since fixed the issue, and it wasn't bricking consoles, just sending them into a crash loop that can be quickly fixed in under 5 minutes. Delete the message on the PS mobile app, go into Safe Mode, use Option 5, console back to normal. ^DB
— Ask PlayStation UK (@AskPS_UK) October 15, 2018
