Sony says the PS5’s recent homepage ad spam was a “tech error”

Players were inundated with ads, many of which were months out of date

Sony Interactive Entertainment

Over the weekend, PS5 owners booted up their consoles to discover that the entire dashboard of the console was littered with ads. Hovering over a game would show recent – or in some cases not so recent – news for the game, often taking over the entire screen and replacing the lovely game art that typically accompanies a game’s panel. Now, Sony’s saying that the whole thing was a tech error. 

In a post on Twitter, the official Ask PlayStation account confirmed that the issue was caused by “a tech error” with the Official News feature, which typically shows new information about a game or a series underneath the game’s icon. Some developers and publishers don’t update this feed often, sometimes only adding news pieces when the game is on sale, leading many to see big splash pages advertising a sale that was months out of date. Thankfully, it seems to have been fixed now. 

“A tech error with the Official News feature on the PS5 console has since been resolved,” the Ask PlayStation tweet reads. “There have been no changes to the way game news is displayed on PS5.” 

Some players weren’t exactly convinced by the response, with many thinking that this was less of a tech error and more of a quiet attempt to push ads onto the dashboard. Many publishers use the Official News feature to advertise merchandise or new games under the same label, so it’s easy to see how some could come to that conclusion, but as of yet there’s no reason to believe that Sony is lying — it looked too much like a weird bug to be deliberate. 

Unfortunately it wasn’t the only tech error Sony’s been dealing with of late. Shortly after the dashboard was freed from its ad spam, the PlayStation Network went down and nobody really knows why. Sony has yet to acknowledge the hours-long outage on its social media, leaving players to keep an eye on the PSN status page instead. Thankfully, it seems like services are up and running again, and hopefully will remain that way.