Sony was able to handle quite easily the massive traffic brought by the holiday season and the PlayStation Network only suffered minimal interruptions despite the threat of takedowns from malicious groups. However, on Jan. 4, the PlayStation Network finally had its first outage of 2016.

Sony acknowledged that the PlayStation Network is down for gamers who are accessing the platform via PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita. At the same time, the company did not provide any reason for the outage and no advisory was given as to when the service will be back online.

The PlayStation Network has had several outages in past few years. The most prominent of these outages happened in 2011 when the network's security was compromised which ultimately led to a 23-day outage, according to Forbes. In 2014, the PlayStation Network, along with Xbox Live, was taken down by the hacking group Lizard Squad causing discontent among users throughout the holiday season.

Following the outage, @AskPlayStation tweeted, "We're aware that some users are having trouble accessing PSN. Thanks for your patience as we investigate."

Several hours into the outage and PlayStation Network members are still complaining that they cannot access the network. What enraged same members is the utter lack of update regarding the main cause of the issue. Some gamers vented their frustrations into several social networking sites.

According to The Verge, Sony Computer Entertainment president Shuhei Yoshida confirmed that the service is fully back online.