Further update (November 16): PSN was taken down early yesterday evening, sending users a message that "Sony Entertainment Network is currently undergoing maintenance." The service came back online later yesterday night.

Update: Well this is interesting: Electronic Arts has put out a sweeping statement that seems to blame practically every potential PS4 game crash or connection issue on Sony's firmware 1.5 update. The statement has since been deleted, and an EA representative told Polygon it was "posted in error."

"Sony has released a firmware update for the PlayStation 4 that is required for many features on the console. However, this update also results in stability issues while playing games on the system," the statement reads. "This affects all games on the PS4, including EA titles, causing crashing/freezing and non-responsive connections between the player's console and their TV Screen."

That's quite a wide-ranging allegation for the publisher to make, covering as it does not just EA's games but every title on the system. We've reached out to Sony and EA for comment on the matter and will let you know if we hear more details.

Original story: Even as hundreds of thousands of gamers started plugging in their new PlayStation 4 consoles after midnight launches in North America, Sony is acknowledging that some users are having trouble connecting to the PlayStation Network, with many running into errors when downloading and installing a massive, crucial day-one update.

"PSN seeing very high volume, some gamers may experience difficulty connecting, thanks for your patience," Sony tweeted from the official PlayStation account overnight. "If you're getting a network error on the PS4, please sit tight," reads an early-morning tweet from the official Ask PlayStation account. "As you can imagine, we're seeing heavy traffic tonight!"

Some of that heavy traffic, of course, is coming from players downloading the 300MB firmware 1.5 update that unlocks many crucial features of the system, everything from online gameplay to Blu-ray playback. That update could be downloaded to a USB stick ahead of time for offline installation, but it's hard to say how many people actually went through the trouble to do this.

A message on the PS4 support forums acknowledges two specific error codes affecting PSN logins, but it doesn't provide much additional information at the moment. Elsewhere on those forums, there are scattered reports of login and download errors, but nothing close to the deluge of self-reported problems seen in the wake of launches like SimCity or Diablo 3 (make of these skewed samples of self-reporting forum-goers what you will, of course). We have yet to have any problems logging in or using all PlayStation Network services on our test unit.

Meanwhile, Sony has also responded to scattered reports that pre-launch hardware provided to journalists was failing at a higher than normal rate. In a statement provided to IGN, a Sony representative said that "less than 0.4% of shipped units to date" have had hardware issues, well within the company's expectations.

"Be assured we are investigating reported PS4 issues. The number is very small compared to shipped, we believe they are isolated incidents," Sony's Shuhei Yoshida tweeted yesterday regarding the hardware failure reports.