Gran Turismo 7’s servers have now been down for over 24 hours

Gran Turismo 7‘s servers have now been offline for more than a day.

The servers initially went down on Thursday at 6am GMT / 2am ET for update maintenance, and were supposed to return two hours later.

However, at the time of writing the servers have now been down for 29 hours, and there has been no update on when they’re expected to come back online.

UPDATE: Polyphony Digital CEO Kazunori Yamauchi has addressed Gran Turismo 7’s recent lengthy server downtime, which has now ended, as well as the controversial decision to tweak winnings to make grinding for cars even longer.

ORIGINAL STORY CONTINUES: “Due to an issue found in Update 1.07, we will be extending the Server Maintenance period,” the game’s official Twitter account posted on Thursday, a few hours after the game was supposed to go back online.

“We will notify everyone as soon as possible when this is likely to be completed. We apologise for this inconvenience and ask for your patience while we work to resolve the issue.”

Gran Turismo 7 is highly dependent on players having an online connection. The only part of it that is accessible without being connected to the internet is its arcade mode.

Polyphony Digital CEO and series producer Kazunori Yamauchi also addressed the issue on Twitter, simply saying “my apologies”.

The delay does not appear to be related to any damage caused by the magnitude 7.3 earthquake which hit Japan on Wednesday. Before the downtime started, Yamauchi addressed the event on Twitter, saying: “We don’t know the precise extent of overall damage across Japan yet, but at this point in time our Polyphony Tokyo Studio and our servers are safe.”

When the game’s latest update first went live, players reportedly discovered that Polyphony had reduced the amount of in-game currency some races rewarded, thereby making it harder to unlock new cars, despite widespread criticism of the game’s microtransactions. The game’s patch notes were later published, confirming rewards for some events have been adjusted, although not by how much.

Further reading

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Following microtransaction criticism, Gran Turismo 7’s latest patch makes it harder to earn cars

The patch appears to target races that players were using to farm in-game currency

Prior to the game’s release, Polyphony Digital CEO Kazunori Yamauchi said Gran Turismo 7’s campaign requires an internet connection in order to combat cheating.

He told Eurogamer the requirement was “just to prevent cheating overall from people trying to modify the save data, so that’s the reason for the online connection”.