LittleBigPlanet Servers Return For PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 and Vita Shut Down

On September 13th, 2021, the LittleBigPlanet 3 servers returned for PlayStation 4 users and were permanently shut down for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. This leaves LittleBigPlanet 3 and Sackboy: A Big Adventure as the only remaining online titles of the LittleBigPlanet and Sackboy franchise. Let's talk about how we got here, what happened, and what's next for LittleBigPlanet. We'll also talk about the future of the LBP Union's Reconnected contest and a brand new event called LBP Reflections.

Server Outages

The LBP Union has been covering the LittleBigPlanet server outage since it began in March. The outages were reported by a number of major media outlets like IGN. Shut down due to a malicious DOS attack on the servers, the team worked behind the scenes to bring us LittleBigPlanet back in April-May. However, the servers had to once again be shut down on May 22nd to prevent malicious scripts from being used from pushing hateful messages to players.

For months, the servers remained offline. Our team developed a brand new server monitor bot for our Discord server, Agent Washington, that can tell us when the servers are online. Thanks to the efforts of our R&D team members Aklnthndr and NyaZero, Agent Washington is now able to provide live server monitoring to our server status dashboard webpage.

Servers Tested

At 4:34 AM EDT, Agent Washington detected the LittleBigPlanet server status code changed from 503 to 404. This event preceded the servers coming back online, but what does this mean?

Agent Washington is programmed to check the server status every 30 seconds. It does this by attempting to connect to the server and reporting back the status code. Whenever you visit a website through your web browser, you get an HTTP status code. If the page loads, like this blog post, you get the code '200' which means everything is fine.

However, there are other codes. When the servers are offline, the server reports '503' which means the server is unavailable. However, for 6 minutes the server reported a 404 code. You may recognize this code as being the status of a webpage that is 'not found'.

In the past, this indicated that the servers were online. However, we talked in our last update about how new server security meant that this became much more complicated. If anything, the status change this morning simply meant that something was happening behind the scenes. The developers were working on something, perhaps testing something in preparation for a full deployment.

Official Announcement: Servers Back Online

Finally, at 10:00 AM EDT, the official LittleBigPlanet Twitter account posted this update,

For readers using a screen reader, this is what the text in the tweeted image says,

Hello,

Firstly, we would like to apologise for the extended downtime of the LittleBigPlanet server and want to thank you al for your patience whilst we worked on this issue.

The good news is that we have just launched Game Update 1.27 and brought the LittleBigPlanet server (and all 10,000,000+ community levels!!) back online for PlayStation 4 users!

Unfortunately, we need to permanently shut down our online services for: LittleBigPlanet, LittleBigPlanet 2, LittleBigPlanet 3 (PS3) and LittleBigPlanet PS Vita.

We have no doubt that this news will come as a big disappointment to a lot of you, ultimately this is the best way to protect the LittleBigPlanet community and to help ensure that our online environment remains safe. Thank you for being a wonderful community and for your continued love and support of all things Sackboy.

Several minutes before the tweet was posted, our status monitor detected that the status code of the servers had once again returned to 404, indicating that the servers were now online.

To be sure of the change, I booted up my PS4 and sure enough I was able to connect to the game's online features.