One of the improvements of the PS4 over the PS3 is the ability to use your Facebook avatar. Unfortunately, a rare issue seems to have, recently, started becoming more common – the image refusing to appear.

It happened to me last week – instead of my round, shiny face appearing on my PS4 I got a grey blocked circle image. I checked on my PS4 profile settings and it was using Facebook. So I switched it to my standard PSN avatar and it happily updated to that. Then I switched it back to Facebook – broken. I disconnected my Facebook account from PSN and re-did it.. still the same.

A quick Google shows many others with the same issue – it’s been a problem for a while with, apparently, no fix but has been getting a lot worse recently.

Rather than use my old-school avatar I’m using the option to use an avatar via the PSN app instead. The app is always useful to have anyway but you can also use it to upload your own avatar to that, and then the PS4 will use that instead. As someone who regularly changes their Facebook image, I actually prefer doing it this way as I can set a consistent avatar that isn’t linked to my personal Facebook account.