A weird PS4 messaging glitch is causing consoles to crash

Over the weekend, a slew of PS4 have reportedly received messages from other players that render their consoles useless.

The problem, which affects users who send and receive messages via PlayStation Messages on their consoles, was originally highlighted on Reddit.

“There is a new glitch that basically bricks your console and forces you to factory reset it. Even deleting the message from the mobile app doesn’t work,” revealed one Reddit user.

While each message seems to be different and sent from different users, there is one common element: most of these messages have characters that the PS4 can’t quite render.

“I had a player named Zilla-Trickz that sent me 7 messages saying: Fortnite []<3, but the heart was an emoji. It crashed my system until i rebuilt my system data through safe mode. Sony definitely needs to fix this,” one user wrote.

Sony is yet to make an official statement about the issue, however an email to VG24/7 suggests that Sony is “aware of the situation and are planning a system software update to resolve this problem”.

On Twitter, PlayStation’s UK-based helpline responded to a few complaints directly, saying that the simple fix is to delete the message from your console via the PlayStation app.

“We are looking into this at the moment, but we are not seeing any bricked consoles from this, just a crash loop which can be fixed by deleting the message in question using the PS messaging app”, it explained, saying that the Rebuild Database option in Safe Mode can also help resolve the problem.

We are looking into this at the moment, but we are not seeing any bricked consoles from this, just a crash loop which can be fixed by deleting the message in question using the PS messaging app, then using Option 5 in Safe Mode. You’ll be fine after this. ^DB

— Ask PlayStation UK (@AskPS_UK) October 15, 2018

PS4 users experiencing the issue recommend others to adjust the privacy settings of their PlayStation profiles to ensure they only receive messages from known contacts.

Feature image: Sony