It looks like there is a way around it if you have received the infected message.
Over the weekend, we reported that numerous PS4 players had taken to social media to complain about a bug that appears to be breaking their consoles.
One user on Reddit explains exactly what happened to him:
“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. It happened to me during Rainbow Six: Siege. A player from the other team used a dummy account to send the message and crashed my entire team. We all have had to factory reset. Only one of our guys wasn’t affected and he has his messages private.”
The folks at The Verge had advised gamers to ensure that their privacy settings only allow them to receive messages from friends, also stating that if you have received the bug, you may need to rebuild your system database.
On Monday, the official PlayStation UK support team on Twitter seemed to verify that a system rebuild is the best way around the problem, stating that you’d also need to delete the message from your mobile messaging app before opening the message on the PS4 itself.
In response to a query about the bug, they responded:
“We are aware and investigating, but it doesn’t reset your console to factory settings. All you need to do is delete the message via the PS messaging app, and use Option 5 in Safe Mode to sort your console out.”
Option 5 in Safe Mode is that Data Rebuild, described as “Scans the drive and creates a new database of all content on the system. This operation may take a long time depending on the type and number of data items. This option is useful for cleaning up the data on your PS4 as it reorganises everything on the hard drive. Select this option if you are experiencing issues such as game freezes or frame rate drops”.
Here’s hoping these same kind of issues don’t plague the PS5 when it finally gets released.
