Over the past few days, several PlayStation users have been reporting a malicious console-crashing attack sent via console message. Players claimed a specific character combination had “bricked” their consoles, forced them to factory reset their PlayStations, and that “even deleting the message from the mobile app” didn’t protect them. The only known way for players to protect themselves was by setting their messages to private.
PlayStation has now publicly acknowledged the problem, in a tweet sent from the British support account – which claims the issue can be solved in under five minutes.
According to the tweet, the exploit does not actually brick consoles, but was instead “sending them into a crash loop”. Some players appeared to be on the right lines by hoping to delete the message via the PS mobile app – but to fully stop the message players should also “go into Safe Mode” and then “use Option 5” (that’s “Rebuild Database”) to get their consoles back to normal.
Source: Eurogamer PlayStation says it has fixed messages that were crashing consoles