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How to protect your PlayStation 4 from a message that can brick it

At the weekend PlayStation 4 owners took to Reddit to warn other owners of the console about a message that can brick it.

While these sorts of messages are common for smartphones, this is the first time we’ve heard of a console being affected by such a bug.

A screenshot of the harmless looking message was posted to Reddit and if you are morbidly curious about what it looks like you can click this link.

As of time of writing it’s not clear why this message is causing consoles to become fancy paper weights but there are ways to protect yourself.

The first thing you can do is change your message settings so that only friends or – if you prefer – no one can message you.

This can be done on the console, the PS4 mobile app or a browser.

Head to Settings, then Account Management, then Privacy settings at which point you will be prompted to enter your password.

After doing that head to Personal Info, Messaging and then set Messages to either Friends or No One.

But my console is already bricked

If, during Call of Duty release weekend a nasty gamer from the team you defeated sent you this message there is a way to fix your PS4.

The first thing you need to do is delete the message. This must be done via the PS Messages app or the PlayStation website.

Then once the message is deleted you need to boot the console into safe mode. To do this, with the PlayStation 4 switched off, hold the Power button for seven seconds. You should hear a beep and then see the safe mode menu disappear. Your PS4 controller will need to be plugged into the console via USB.

Once you have done that you need to rebuild the console’s database.

What you’ll need is three screws, a magnet and, just kidding.

Simply select the option Rebuild Database from the Safe Mode menu and let the console do its thing.

Once completed your PlayStation 4 should be firing on all cylinders and all your game downloads and saved games should be intact.

Hopefully Sony will patch this issue as soon as possible.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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