Fans are reporting that their PS4 “NAT Type” is failing and making it difficult to connect to online services.
PS4 owners are reporting seeing an orange Nat Type, rather than the usual green one. At orange, it could mean that players are restricted in what they can do online and who they can play multiplayer with.
However, there’s a good chance that today’s problems are connected to an internet provider issue in certain regions, and is something that might be worth checking out.
Here’s an explanation of the problem, courtesy of Reddit: “Your NAT is basically how protected you are by a firewall/router, and who you can communicate with.
“Orange means that you’re restricting who can join you and who you can join, it means the ports that AC4’s MP uses to communicate are restricted or blocked by your router.
“The reason it changed from green to orange is likely just that your IP address in your PS4 is setup automatically instead of manually, so one day you turned on your PS4 and some other device was occupying the previous IP that it had, or it just grabbed the first one available, which happened to have fewer ports open.
“Anyway, the easiest way to change it and solve that problem with every game is to just make your PS4 a DMZ in your router settings, and then manually set the IP, that’ll set all ports to open.
“If you’re not comfortable with that, you can find the ports to open with Google and adjust your router’s port forwarding settings. Again, that’ll require manual setup of the IP address in the PS4.”
The unusual thing about today’s report is that this PS4 Nat Type error appears to be affecting a wide range of gamers.
Sony PlayStation has not posted any news online suggesting that there is an issue with the PSN.
So, this might suggest an issue with a localised internet provider, rather than the PSN itself.
If this does prove to be a problem with the PlayStation Network, Sony should post an update informing fans in the coming hours.