PSN is down for the second time this week [Update]

It would seem that Sony is struggling to keep PSN afloat this week. Back on Tuesday, a number of users had problems playing PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 games online. Today, most of the services available through the PlayStation Network have gone down, so if you're having problem doing nearly anything on PS4, you can take heart that it's not just you.

On the other side of that coin, though, it appears that this outage is much more severe than the one we experienced on Tuesday. A glance at the PSN service status page tells us everything we need to know: nearly every PSN service is down at the moment, with the sole exception of PlayStation Vue.

This means that attempts to play PS4 or PS3 games online, use PlayStation Now, or access the PlayStation Store are likely to fail at the moment. This stands in stark contrast to the outage from earlier in the week, which only affected Games and Social services. The Ask PlayStation Twitter account says that Sony engineers are on the problem and working on a fix, but for now, we don't have any information on when that fix will arrive.

Just like we did with the last outage, we're now left to play the waiting game. This is a particularly disappointing development, as it also happens to be launch day for Monster Hunter: World. When you consider that this is the first Monster Hunter game to launch on modern consoles (and indeed, the first on consoles in quite some time), that PSN outage probably stings just a little bit more for a lot of eager Monster Hunter fans.

As with all outages of this nature, there's always the chance that you might still be able to access affected services, but if you're going to try, it's probably best not to hope for anything. Hopefully it doesn't take too long to sort these issues out. We'll keep you posted on any new developments, so stay tuned.

Update: It seems the PlayStation Network is back up, at least according to the PSN service status page. At this point, the Ask PlayStation Twitter account has yet to issue an update on the outage, so don't be surprised if some services are still struggling. Be sure to hop down to the comments section and let us know if you're able to log in.