Sony was forced to shut down the PlayStation Network for half an hour early Monday morning after its networks were inundated by customers trying to reset their passwords.
"We're currently experiencing an extremely heavy load of password resets, so we recently had to turn off services for approximately 30 minutes to clear the queue," wrote Nick Caplan, head of communications, at the Sony PlayStation EU blog. "If you've requested your password reset, please give it a bit of time to reach your email."
On Saturday, when Sony began restoring its online services to millions of users in the Americas, Europe, and Australia (but not Japan), Sony said customers would have to wait for an email with a link to reset their passwords before being allowed back into the PlayStation Network.
Unfortunately this process has been bogged down with delays, with customers awaiting the email lashing out on Sony's blogs, forums, and social networks.
"I hate Sony! Not only have they been down for a month on PSN, I've been waiting 7 1/2 hours on an email with my new password. #dicks," tweeted @fraser_galloway from Scotland on Monday.
The PlayStation U.S. blog even shut down its comments section temporarily.
On Monday, Caplan acknowledged in the comments section of his blog post that some users may experience delays in receiving the email:
"We do not control the length of time the email delivery will take, this is dependent on the ISP. For some it may be instant or take a few hours, for others it could be more than a day (we see some emails with an age of 20+ hours already)," he wrote.
"If the consumer gets an email from us after 24 hours from the time they did the initial reset, the link will be invalid. They will then need to go through the password reset flow once again to get a new link. Hopefully the issues will be resolved by then."
Caplan also advised customers not to send multiple requests for resetting their passwords.
If you're a PSN user in the U.S. and still haven't received your reset email, speak up through one of Sony's customer support channels.