Bought a PS4 yesterday? Have a little trouble signing into PSN? Us too dear readers. As we expected, the servers strained and buckled under pressure as European gamers tried to sign into PSN on their new PS4’s to download demos, get their free PS Plus games, play online or redeem vouchers. At least the day one firmware patch was available to download without being signed into PSN.

Sony took their time yesterday, but finally acknowledged via Twitter and their Blog that there was an issue, which was something of a relief that it wasn’t something on our end to be honest.

For now, Sony has attempted a fix by temporarily suspending voucher redemption, which will help to ease the strain on the busy network as it’s thought that codes to upgrade from PS3 games to their next-gen counterparts (FIFA, COD, Battlefield etc) are one of the main problems.

Yesterday evening, I was finally able to sign in and get the latest patches for Killzone and Assassin’s Creed IV, and sync up my account with facebook et al. Then I helped add to the network strain by downloading all the free things I could find including Contrast, Resogun, Warframe, War Thunder and the demos for FIFA, NBA and Trine 2. I’ve not tried hopping online for a game of Killzone yet, but will surely give it a blast as soon as I’m done here.

We’re expecting another update from Sony later today, hopefully it won’t involve further function suspensions or the servers going down for maintenance. Here’s the last update they posted this morning on the EU Blog:

“We are making progress in identifying the source of the current PSN disruption. Currently sign up, sign in, trials, store, online gameplay, share and community functionality is available. Redeem voucher is still not open to users. Further updates will be posted later today.”

[UPDATE: “(9.22pm GMT, 30th November): Users will be aware that core network stability has returned throughout today and we are beginning the next phase of PSN service roll-out e.g. users will soon be able to progressively see the content info area for game titles. Voucher redemption continues to be controlled in order to cope with volume. We will have an update tomorrow. Thank you for your patience as we manage PSN to restore full service.”

How are you finding your PS4 folks? Any problems, or did you smugly slip through the net and download everything without any problems?