When I got my PS4 on day one release there were a number of issues with servers having issues. Unfortunately, this manifested itself as a number of numeric errors that didn’t actually mean anything. No accompanying message that would explain what it meant. Even a quick Google of the error often lead to just streams on people on forums asking what it means.

Take yesterday, I signed onto my PS3 which I’ve been using recently, with no issue, to watch movies and even, just the day before, to download a movie from the PlayStation Store. I needed to check something in Battlefield 3 so started that up to find… I was offline. I tried signing in but got the error “80028ED6”. I closed down Battlefield and found that PSN re-connected. I started Battlefield once more and immediately went offline again – it was obviously related to that.

A quick Google and it was suggested that a firmware update was required – I checked and that was correct. I installed it and BF3 worked fine.

I’ve since found that searching for an error code on the PlayStation site is Sony’s recommended solution. However, that stated that the error was…

There was a problem connecting to the patch server.

When you start a network-enabled game, the PS3 system will connect to the patch server to check if a new patch for the title has been released. If the connection fails, the PS3 system will sign out of PlayStation Network.

But it wasn’t this. Or rather it was but this doesn’t explain it.

It would appear that because a firmware update was required for the PlayStation it wasn’t able to connect to the patch server to see if any updates were requires for the game I was starting. Because of this it simply logged out. Which is, let’s be honest, a rubbish solution.

The same article had some suggestions for fixing this error…

• Exit the game and start it again.
• If the game will not launch, attempt to connect at a later time.

If you followed this advise it would never have worked.

As it was this shouldn’t have happened because I have PlayStation Plus and have the console set up to do daily updates automatically – except I found this had been switched off.

A quick update to the system and everything was working once again.

But, really, Sony? Would it be so hard to get the console to display these message pages that you obviously have documented and maybe, just maybe, write them so that they’re actually useful?