Several PlayStation 4 owners reported that their consoles have bricked due to a certain possible glitch via private messages.
PlayStation 4 consoles getting bricked by hacked messages
PS4 users went to Reddit to advise others that they should set their messages to private after they received a certain message on their console. They reported that when they viewed that message, their consoles froze, and they were forced to factory reset them to get it working again.
According to the Reddit users, these messages cannot be deleted even on the mobile app. There are other users who claimed that it worked for them. There were some that when they received the message, they did not even open them but the console still froze and they were forced to factory reset it.
Reddit user Hunstarck, the topic starter stated:
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.
Do this ASAP to prevent this from happening to you.
Reddit user Runedk93 stated:
Also happend to me! I was in a ranked game and suddenly my teammate froze. Then i got a message and my controller stopped responding. Now my ps4 keeps crashing everytime i log in to my account. I can acess my other accounts on my ps4 though. Im trying the rebuild fix right now.
To be safe, everyone should just set their messages option to private for now. Hopefully Sony Interactive Entertainment has a solution for this, but there is still no word from them.