So you’ve finally gotten your hands on a brand new PlayStation 4 or Nintendo Switch for Christmas, and you’re excited to load it up and download some new games. However, as you load the online store, you’re met with an error message that the servers are currently down, or you're unable to redeem your vouchers, and you’re left with a brand new console that has no games for you to play during the holiday. Pretty disappointing right?

Yesterday, both Nintendo’s Eshop and Sony’s PlayStation Network suffered from outages and issues with voucher redemption that left players unable to open up both online platforms, and redeem new games. This downtime left numerous players disappointed as the holiday season is usually the time when gamers buy a brand new console. 

Both Sony and Nintendo have acknowledged the incident and promised players that they are doing their best to fix these errors immediately. 

As of today, I tried to access both shops and did not encounter any error. So it seems like both Sony and Nintendo was able to recover from the outage. However, if you’re still encountering connectivity issues, I suggest you give it a little time and better hang out with your relatives for now. 

Both Sony and Nintendo are still due to give an explanation on the recent connectivity issues with their stores. The fact that Christmas time usually brings tons of traffic to their online platforms is a possible explanation to the outages. However, history would tell us that massive traffic is not always the case. 

Remember the infamous scenario that Xbox Live and PlayStation Network experienced back in 2014? Both platforms became a target for hackers and were unavailable for a long period of time. Hopefully, this is not the reason for the recent downtime of the servers because it would raise serious concerns on how users of these online stores are protected, especially the vital data that can be leaked such as personal information, credit card numbers, among other things. Although nothing official has been said regarding the recent issues, it seems like hackers are not involved this time.

Are you now able to access the PlayStation Network and Nintendo’s Eshop? If you’re looking for the best games you can play on your brand new Switch, check out our suggestions here.