Sony has announced that they are officially pulling the plug on some of their older online servers. The company has decided to take this action due to several DDoS attacks in the middle of 2020, as well as hackers leaving very offensive messages within them. While the company and an in-house developer attempted to fix the issue, it looks like they decided to just shut them down. The servers in question? LittleBigPlanet, LittleBigPlanet 2, LittleBigPlanet 3 on the PlayStation 3, and LittleBigPlanet on the PS Vita. As of this writing, all of the aforementioned servers are now permanently shut down.

An update on the LittleBigPlanet server and online services: pic.twitter.com/vUrvHcZvIs

— Sackboy: A Big Adventure | LittleBigPlanet (@LittleBigPlanet) September 13, 2021

The announcement was made by the official LittleBigPlanet Twitter account, which can be seen above. In their post, they state that while they were able to update and bring the server back online for the PlayStation 4 server, the damage was apparently too great for the PlayStation 3 and PS Vita ones. The PlayStation 4 server is used for the system’s iteration of LittleBigPlanet 3, which was released for both of Sony’s consoles. While the details are very vague, it’s more than likely easier for them to sunset the older generation servers as opposed to continuously trying to fix them. In addition, the PlayStation 4’s tech is able to be updated much more easily with newer online security firmware.

Unfortunately, the LittleBigPlanet franchise is widely known for its community-driven creativity, especially when it comes to the levels that are uploaded to the titles for others to try out. Now that the servers are shut down, players on both the PlayStation 3 and PS Vita titles are unable to download or upload created levels. While this probably won’t affect a large amount of the community, this is still a major blow for those who still play the franchise on the older platforms.