Sony, the renowned Japanese electronics-manufacturer, has started compensating for the recent PSN downtime by offering game time, PlayStation Now and video rental extensions to affected users around the world. The PSN outage earlier this month lasted for about 10 hours.

Gamers with an active PlayStation Plus subscription during the PSN outage, which began on 4 January, will have their memberships extended sometime this week. Sony did not reveal the length of the extensions, but the official PlayStation Twitter account on Tuesday said the details are being sent out to the gamers in emails.

The compensation emails do not require any action from the recipient as the extension on the services will be allotted to them automatically. Those who wish to know how much extension Sony provided for the outage will have to contact the company via email.

A Twitter user said his PSN network was extended by five days although he hadn't received an email from Sony. So, don't panic if you did not get an email from Sony about the compensation. 

The connectivity issues affected PSN users on PS3, PS4 and web services. Sony did not reveal the reason behind the 10-hour outage, but a hacker group that goes by the name Phantom Squad claimed responsibility for bringing down the PSN around the world, an earlier report had said.

Last year, Phantom Squad warned gamers it would shut down Xbox Live and PSN networks for one week during Christmas. But there were no reports of gamers experiencing issues connecting their consoles to respective networks.

In other news, Sony also pushed out an update for PlayStation 4 owners. The update, which weighs 275MB, reportedly improves the quality of the system performance, the company said.