Sony’s PlayStation Network experienced a fresh wave of user-reported access problems Thursday, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector, adding to what has become an unusually persistent pattern of disruptions affecting the gaming service throughout 2026.

Downdetector posted on its official account on the social platform X that “user reports indicate problems with Playstation Network since 12:55 PM EDT,” tagging the post with the hashtag #PlaystationNetworkDown and directing affected users to its outage-tracking page for further updates. The post had drawn nearly 1,200 views within a short period after being published.

Thursday’s reported disruption extends a notably rocky year for PSN reliability. According to a running tally maintained by Tech Insider, PlayStation Network went down six separate times over just over four months earlier this year, most recently during a roughly five-hour, 23-minute worldwide disruption affecting PS5, PS4 and web services on July 24. That outage, one of the most severe of the year, drew significant attention given that Sony has offered no public explanation for the cause behind any of the six confirmed incidents logged so far in 2026.

Coverage of the July 24 outage from Push Square documented the incident unfolding in real time over several hours that afternoon and evening. Sony’s own service status page described the network as “experiencing issues” for an extended period, with the company specifically flagging difficulty accessing the PlayStation Store even as other functions gradually returned. According to Push Square’s live updates, Downdetector showed a substantial spike in user reports across the United States during the outage, which only began meaningfully easing several hours after the initial disruption began. By that evening, Sony confirmed PSN was “up and running” again, though the outlet noted some isolated issues could still linger even after the broader network had stabilized.

The timing of PSN’s repeated 2026 outages has drawn particular scrutiny given a separate decision by Sony earlier this year to raise PlayStation Plus subscription prices. According to Tech Insider, Sony increased PlayStation Plus pricing across all tiers effective May 20, 2026, citing “ongoing market conditions,” with the Monthly Essential tier rising from $9.99 to $10.99 and Monthly Premium climbing from $17.99 to $19.99, while annual subscription pricing remained unchanged in that particular round of increases. A network disruption followed less than 24 hours after that price hike took effect, logging 176 reports within the first 24 hours on outage-tracking service IsDown, according to Tech Insider’s reporting, with the outlet noting that, as of its most recent update, no public explanation had been offered for that specific incident either. The recurring outages carry added significance for subscribers specifically because online multiplayer functionality on both PS5 and PS4 requires at least a PlayStation Plus Essential subscription, meaning each PSN disruption this year has directly blocked a feature that subscribers are now paying more to access following the May price increase.

Sony has faced additional headwinds beyond the outage pattern and pricing changes in recent months. According to Tech Insider, the company also settled a $7.85 million antitrust case related to older digital purchases, and is separately planning to retire the “PlayStation Network” branding by September 2026 in favor of a visual rebrand, while keeping user accounts, friends lists and underlying services otherwise unchanged. The outlet emphasized that none of these developments, including the repeated outages, the pricing changes, the antitrust settlement and the branding shift, are legally connected to one another, even as their overlapping timing has drawn continued attention from gaming media and PlayStation’s user base.

The stakes surrounding PSN reliability have also grown given Sony’s broader strategic direction for its console business. According to Game Informer, PlayStation announced earlier this year that it will cease production of physical game discs for new titles beginning in January 2028, a shift that will leave players increasingly dependent on digital distribution and, by extension, on PSN’s continued reliability. Game Informer noted that during PSN outages, physical discs have historically allowed players to at least access offline-playable content stored directly on a disc, while many digital games, including some single-player titles, require an online authentication check that becomes impossible to complete when the network is down, leaving affected players locked out of games they own entirely during service disruptions.

Sony’s history with major PSN outages extends well beyond this year’s cluster of incidents. The most severe disruption in the network’s history remains the 2011 PlayStation Network outage, a 24-day incident caused by an external security intrusion that exposed personal data for 77.1 million PlayStation Network accounts and ultimately cost Sony an estimated $171 million. More recently, a major outage in February 2025 left PlayStation users worldwide unable to access online services, manage accounts or make purchases through the PlayStation Store for more than 18 hours, according to Notebookcheck’s coverage at the time, affecting popular titles including EA Sports FC and Call of Duty and disrupting scheduled online tournaments and promotional events tied to those games.

As of this report, independent monitoring service Entireweb Status had most recently characterized PlayStation Network as operating normally, based on a check conducted roughly a week prior to Thursday’s reported disruption, recording 80 user reports over a 24-hour period at that earlier point, with three of those submitted within the final hour before the check. Given the discrepancy between that earlier reading and Thursday’s fresh spike in Downdetector complaints, the scope and duration of the current disruption remained unclear as of this report, with Sony not having issued an updated public statement addressing Thursday’s specific reported issues.

Given the network’s documented pattern of repeated, unexplained outages throughout 2026, gamers experiencing difficulty accessing PSN services Thursday were likely to view the disruption as consistent with what has become an increasingly familiar, if still frustrating, feature of the platform’s reliability this year, with continued scrutiny expected regarding whether Sony will offer any public explanation for the underlying cause behind this latest incident, as it has similarly declined to do for each of the network’s prior confirmed outages so far in 2026.

The U.S. economy is currently “worse” than when former President Joe Biden departed office last year, economic and political commentator Peter Schiff asserted, warning that the nation faces the “threat” of a Democratic socialist winning the White House during the 2028 presidential election.

President Donald Trump is “unpopular because the economy is worse now than it was when Biden left office,” Schiff, chief economist and global strategist of Euro Pacific Asset Management and host of “The Peter Schiff Show” podcast, told Fox News Digital during an interview on Wednesday. 

“So Trump ran promising to fix what Biden broke,” but then “broke it more,” Schiff asserted. 

“He said that prices will come down on day one as soon as I become president,” Schiff said, adding “inflation is a bigger problem now than it was when Trump was elected.”

Fox News Digital reached out to the White House on Thursday.

TRUMP’S APPROVAL RATING PLUMMETS TO NEW LOW AHEAD OF CRITICAL MIDTERMS: ‘MORE WORK TO DO’

Left: Peter Schiff during the London Blockchain Conference at The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre on June 2, 2023, in London; Right: President Donald Trump gestures as he boards Air Force One on Aug. 9, 2026, at Morristown Airport in Morristown, (Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images for London Blockchain Conference; Eric Lee/Getty Images)

While Republicans currently hold majorities in both chambers of Congress, Schiff said that he thinks the GOP will lose many House seats in the midterm elections this year and that they “have a real chance of losing the Senate too.”

Schiff said he expects the party to lose control of the Senate in 2028 if they haven’t lost their majority in the chamber before then and that he thinks the GOP will lose the presidency in 2028 as well. He warned that “the real threat” looming over the 2028 White House contest is the possibility of “a real Democratic socialist” getting elected as president.

Schiff, who is involved in selling precious metals through SchiffGold, made a case for people buying gold and silver. “Buy real money that will preserve its purchasing power,” he said.

HOW MUCH HAS THE NATIONAL DEBT GROWN UNDER PRESIDENT TRUMP?

U.S. one hundred dollar bills are shown in this picture illustration in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 10, 2025. (Matias Baglietto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

He argued that investors should be “diversifying into stocks in international markets” to protect against “a weak U.S. dollar.”

Schiff said “stagflation” will “be a big problem for the U.S. economy for years to come,” warning of a “crisis” pertaining to “sovereign debt” as well as “currency.”

“But I want people to understand that this is not about a failure of capitalism. It’s about a failure to have capitalism. It’s a failure of central planning, central government, central banking. It’s big government that interfered with the free market that created the problem. And the solutions that are gonna be proposed by government to increase the size of government, to have even more regulation, to have even more taxes, they will just make all the problems worse,” Schiff said.

The U.S. national debt has surpassed $40 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury.

“We need to rein in government. We need massive cuts to government spending, deregulation, we need free market forces,” he said.

US NATIONAL DEBT HITS $40 TRILLION MILESTONE FOR FIRST TIME EVER

The U.S. Capitol building is seen at sunset on Aug. 12, 2026, in Washington, D.C.  (Kevin Carter/Getty Images)

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Schiff said, “Republicans are in a predicament because doing the right thing economically is probably political suicide, which is why they won’t do it.”

People who live past age 100, and especially those who reach 110 or beyond, appear to carry a striking abundance of rare, cancer-fighting immune cells in their blood, according to new research that offers a possible clue into how so-called supercentenarians manage to avoid the illnesses that typically claim most people decades earlier.

The findings, published in the journal Cell Reports through Cell Press, focus on a rare category of T helper cells that appears to proliferate significantly as people age past roughly 100 years old, expanding and adapting over time in ways researchers say reflect an active, evolving immune response rather than simple biological decline.

The human immune system relies on T helper cells, also known as CD4 cells, as a core component of adaptive immunity. Among the many subtypes of CD4 cells, a particularly rare variant known as cytotoxic CD4 T cells, or CD4 CTLs, typically occurs only infrequently in the human body. Unlike most helper cells, which coordinate immune responses, CD4 CTLs function more like dedicated killers, patrolling the body to identify and destroy infected, damaged or cancerous cells before they can cause further harm.

According to the study, these normally scarce CD4 CTLs become increasingly common as people age into their 90s and beyond, with the effect growing even more pronounced among centenarians and supercentenarians specifically. Researchers analyzed blood samples from 28 Japanese participants across different age brackets, a group the study’s authors acknowledge represents a small sample size drawn from a single country and therefore may not necessarily be representative of the broader global population.

Among eight participants in their 70s, 80s and 90s, the median proportion of CD4 CTLs in their blood samples measured 4%. That figure rose sharply among the study’s 10 centenarian participants, where the median proportion reached 9.6%. Among supercentenarians specifically, individuals who have lived past 110, the median proportion climbed even further, to 17.6%. Notably, even within this small sample, researchers identified at least one outlier: a participant who had not yet turned 100 but nonetheless showed the highest proportion of these cells recorded anywhere in the study. Researchers also noted that the CD4 CTLs identified in older participants showed no signs of cellular exhaustion, remaining biologically active despite the advanced age of the individuals carrying them.

Kosuke Hashimoto, an immunologist at the University of Osaka in Japan and one of the study’s researchers, said the findings challenge a common assumption about how the immune system changes with age. “Immune aging is not simply a process of decline,” Hashimoto said. “The selective expansion of certain T cells suggests that, even in extreme old age, the immune system may continue to adapt to age-related challenges.”

To better understand how these cells develop, the research team examined specific proteins present on the surface of the cells. They found that CD4 CTLs appear to emerge through a process in which helper cells sequentially lose two particular surface proteins, first CD27 and later CD28, a transformation that effectively converts the cells from their original helper function into their rarer, cytotoxic killer form.

The researchers also observed a hallmark of active immune defense within the samples: clonal expansion, a process in which killer T cells replicate themselves in response to a perceived threat, effectively building a targeted immune “army” against a specific antigen. According to the study’s findings, roughly 33% of the CD4 CTLs identified in older participants’ blood were, on average, clones descended from a single original cell. In one particularly striking centenarian sample, researchers found that approximately half of that individual’s total CD4 CTL population consisted of copies derived from the very same original cell.

The study’s authors interpret this pattern as evidence that the human body faces a growing burden of immune threats as it ages, and that an expanding population of CD4 CTLs may be helping certain individuals, at least among the Japanese supercentenarians studied, successfully manage those threats well beyond the age at which most people succumb to illness. Describing the underlying immune activity captured in the research, the study’s authors wrote that “these cells exhibit stepwise differentiation and cytokine plasticity, suggesting adaptive responses to persistent antigens during healthy aging.”

Hashimoto connected the broader biological backdrop driving this immune adaptation to the natural accumulation of cellular abnormalities that occurs with advancing age. “As we age, abnormal cells, including senescent and cancerous cells, become more common,” Hashimoto said. “Our findings suggest that immune adaptation to these changes may contribute to exceptional longevity.”

The new findings add to a growing body of research examining the biological underpinnings of extreme human longevity, an area of study that has drawn increasing scientific attention as global populations of centenarians and supercentenarians, though still exceedingly rare, have continued to grow in recent decades. Related research has previously identified other biological markers associated with slower aging among centenarians, including a set of 37 distinct proteins found in the blood of long-lived individuals that researchers have linked to a slower overall pace of biological aging, according to prior coverage of separate longevity research.

Given the modest size and geographic limitation of the current study’s sample, the researchers have cautioned that further work involving larger and more diverse populations will likely be necessary to confirm whether the abundance of CD4 CTLs observed among Japanese supercentenarians represents a broader, universal biological feature of extreme human longevity, or whether it may instead reflect genetic, environmental or lifestyle factors more specific to the population studied. Even so, the findings offer researchers a promising new avenue for understanding how, at a cellular level, a small subset of humans manage to avoid succumbing to cancer and other age-related illnesses well beyond the point at which most people’s immune systems begin to falter.

JONESBORO, ARK. — Contract manufacturer SANY Nutrition Group has opened a food production plant in Jonesboro that will turn out a range of better-for-you and comfort snacks and other products for the private label and branded channels in North America.

In a more than $30 million investment, SANY Nutrition acquired and remodeled the former Butterball manufacturing plant in Jonesboro, according to the Arkansas Economic Development Commission (AEDC). Operations at the facility, which can make up to 400 million bars and bites annually, are underway. The site is expected to create over 150 new jobs in three years.

SANY Nutrition’s manufacturing capabilities cover six product categories: better-for-you snacks (high protein, reduced sugar, functional, plant-based and nutritionally balanced); sports nutrition (performance bars/bites and functional snacks to support energy, endurance, recovery and active living); indulgence-focused comfort snacks (with rich textures, layered fillings, chocolate coatings and bold flavors); frozen plant-based snacks (made with real fruit and vegetables such as pumpkin, beetroot and sweet potato and then protein-enriched and coated in sugar-free chocolate); baked foods and pastries (sweet, savory, better-for-you and functional bakery products, from cinnamon rolls and filled pastries to protein-rich, individually wrapped items); and pet nutrition (treats and functional snacks formulated to meet the needs of pets).

The Jonesboro plant also can produce a range of food ingredients, inclusions, fillings, coatings, bases and semi-finished solutions for food manufacturers, retailers, foodservice operators and brand partners, the AEDC said.

The Jonesboro facility has the capacity to produce up to 400 million bars and bites annually.

| Photo: SANY Nutrition Group

“SANY Nutrition Group is an innovative protein snack manufacturing company that combines the speed and fearless mindset of a startup with the technology, expertise and scale of a global organization,” said Angela Pernsteiner, an investor in Jonesboro-based SANY Nutrition. “Through tailor-made formulation, premium ingredients, state-of-the-art equipment and European-American process excellence, we transform bold ideas into distinctive, shelf-ready products — in weeks, not years.”

With the Jonesboro facility, SANY Nutrition also brings an integrated platform that encompasses consumer insight, concept development, formulation, design, regulatory support, advanced manufacturing, shelf-ready packaging, warehousing and distribution, the AEDC added.

“SANY Nutrition Group is choosing to invest its capital to grow in Jonesboro, Ark., building a new manufacturing facility and creating 150 new jobs,” said Clint O’Neal, executive director of the AEDC. “Jonesboro has become a food manufacturing hub thanks to its abundant natural resources, low costs, and the strategic vision of its leadership. This has led to investments from companies like SANY.” 

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Mortgage rates fell for the second week in a row, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday.

Freddie Mac’s latest Primary Mortgage Market Survey, released Thursday, showed the average rate on the benchmark 30-year fixed mortgage fell to 6.65% from last week’s reading of 6.67%. 

The average rate on a 30-year loan was 6.58% a year ago.

SLOWING LABOR MARKET CREATES NEW HURDLE FOR FIRST-TIME HOMEBUYERS FACING AFFORDABILITY SQUEEZE

“With a dip in rates providing modest relief for homebuyers, it’s important to remember borrowers can potentially save thousands by shopping around for the best mortgage rate,” said Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist.

A real estate agent sets up for an open house in Rancho Cucamonga, California, on May 9, 2026. (Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The average rate on a 15-year fixed mortgage fell to 5.95% from last week’s reading of 5.96%.

Mortgage rates are affected by several factors, including the Federal Reserve and geopolitics. Though mortgage rates are not directly affected by the Fed’s interest rate decisions, they closely track the 10-year Treasury yield. The 10-year yield hovered around 4.7% as of Thursday afternoon.

THESE AMERICAN CITIES ARE TRENDING TOWARD A BUYER’S MARKET

“Today’s print is best understood as the base level from which mortgage rates may push higher next week amid market volatility,” said Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel. “The 30-year Treasury hit a nearly 20-year high this week, enough to prompt the Treasury Department to step in and buy back billions. But thankfully for homebuyers, since most mortgages are only around for seven to ten years before borrowers refinance or move, mortgage rates track the 10-year, which has not moved nearly as dramatically this week.”

Yields on U.S. Treasurys have been elevated recently, in part due to the growth in debt, with the federal government projected to run a roughly $2.1 trillion budget deficit this fiscal year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Two recent Treasury auctions in the last week drew attention due to the yields reaching historic levels – the sale of 10-year notes cleared at a high of 4.683%, the highest in 19 years, while the 30-year bond auction stopped at 5.216%, a 25-year peak.

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