Is LittleBigPlanet Dying? Server Status, #SaveLBP, and More!
Updated: Jul 11, 2021
Update: You can now use our LBP Server Status Dashboard to check if the servers are up as well as see the latest news and updates from the developers!
LittleBigPlanet's online community has been a bit of a tumultuous place recently. With intermittent server outages since Saturday, March 6th and rumors of malicious hacking running amuck, it's no surprise that I've heard the common expressions, "LBP is dying" or "LBP is dead." What's worse, even though the servers had returned for a short period of time in May, they're back down again.
You may already be ready to point fingers about what's going on. Hold on just a second and hear me out, because there are far better things we can do as a community for LittleBigPlanet than to cast blame and give trolls the attention they want.
Let's talk about the recent server outages and what might be causing them before we come to the conclusion of whether or not LittleBigPlanet is dying.
Server Outages
On Saturday, March 6th, 2021, Twitter users noticed that the LittleBigPlanet servers were experiencing some hiccups. I myself attempted to log onto LittleBigPlanet 2 to host a mech battle tournament match when I was unable to access my Earth, Community page, and any published levels. However, I was still able to play with other people on my friends list.
Many players started to see an error that read, "A problem occurred when attempting to connect to the LittleBigPlanet servers (403)."
As the days went on, many noticed similar circumstances which led to uproar on Twitter:
#SaveLBP and Official Response
With no official response, LittleBigPlanet fans erupted on Twitter with a new hashtag, #SaveLBP, in an effort to gain recognition about the issue from Sony and the LittleBigPlanet team. The hashtag trended with over 3,000 tweets as of March 12th. As of April 28th, the hashtag had accrued 16,000 tweets.
After six days of radio silence, an official Sony Twitter account, @Sony_XDEV responded with the following tweet on March 12th:
An hour later, Sumo Digital, the developers of LittleBigPlanet 3 and Sackboy A Big Adventure also gave a statement:
Steven Isbell also eventually responded with his own tweet on the branded @LittleBigPlanet Twitter account, including the #SaveLBP hashtag in the message:
It's clear that the servers, for whatever reason that they may have needed to be taken offline, are being worked on by Sumo Digital, Sony, and the LittleBigPlanet team. Check out our article about the server return timeline.
Rumors Circulate
The day after the server outages began, rumors began to circulate on Twitter that a LittleBigPlanet user had tampered with the servers in a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. What is a denial-of-service attack, and is it hacking?
Denial of Service Attacks
Denial of service attacks overload a server with information to slow it down to a crawl for users like you. A distributed denial of service attack took down PlayStation Network for some time in August 2014.