Sony’s PlayStation Network has been suffering an outage worldwide since Friday night, preventing users from gaming online, streaming videos, or buying new games or consoles.

Just before 6 p.m. Friday, a scant 160 issue reports were on outage monitoring site Downdetector. In just 15 minutes, that number spiked to 16,253 from people using PlayStation, peaking at 6:44 p.m. with over 71,000 reports coming in.

As of Saturday, people were still experiencing problems; as many as 5,623 reports came in at 9:14 a.m. Of the reports sent to Downdetector, 78% focused on server issues, 15% on problems logging in and 5% on using the PlayStation store.

Sony’s PlayStation Network status page doesn’t specify what could be causing the issues.

“We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience,” Sony wrote.

A previous outage on Oct. 1 left gamers unable to use PlayStation for about eight hours, according to technology news website The Verge. Sony hasn’t publicized the cause of that outage.

• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.