PSN is back up in Australia, New Zealand, South America, all of US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Germany

Written by Matt Swider on May 15, 2011

PSN News: PSN is coming back up in Mexico, South America, Australia and New Zealand, while US Canada and Europe should have PS3 online gaming restored.

PSN is back up in in parts of Mexico, South America, Australia and New Zealand, while PS3 online gaming in all of North America and Europe has been fully restored, according to our sources at PlayStation. This news comes after a 24-day outage plagued Sony's videogame network following a breach by hackers for personal data and credit card numbers. The first thing you will do upon signing is change your old hack-exposed password. Please follow our step-by-step images of our article How To Change My PSN Password for more information.

Repopulating of the servers began in California last night before the 8 PM hour struck here in the Pacific time zone. This is most likely because the server is San Diego, where the hack took place, is located in this state. As May 14 turned into May 15, PSN was restored to both the west, then the east coast, starting with New York City and Philadelphia. Eventually, middle America, the midwest and the south were covered (as demonstrated by the now-filled-in map above).

The morning on May 15 (or the night of May 15 across the pond in Europe) also saw restoration in Europe, starting with the UK and Ireland. Tweets from PSN users in Spain, Germany and France, although a little more difficult to understand than their other Euro counterparts all ended with smiley faces, indicating that people are online with their PS3s once again.

PSN is Back Up in Australia and New Zealand

Finally, Sony's non-stop Facebook and Tweet PSN status updates gave us the latest news about Australia and New Zealand. Most of PSN (with the exception of the PlayStation Store) has been restored in this two countries, leaving Japan as one of the few regions without access to the online network.

Gaming Target will keep you updated PSN makes the final push to Japan and countries with smaller populations that Sony has yet to highlight. We'll also give you a heads up on the company's promised "Welcome Back" program rewards, which will include free DLC and 30-day subscriptions to PS Plus and Qrocity.