Potential fix for PS5 & Xbox Series X crashes

Players everywhere had been highly anticipating the releases of the PS5 and Xbox Series X. Many grabbed them as soon as they became available but they have now noted that the consoles are facing severely bad crashes.

Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles had very successful releases recently. Pre-orders and online purchases were in very large numbers and stocks sold out fast. More often than not; new consoles end up facing some problems at launch and these two haven’t proven to be exceptions.

Many players on both platforms have reported strong crashes that do more than just display an error onscreen. They are either forced to restart the game or in some cases; the whole system just shuts off. This has been reported during playthroughs of games like Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Black Ops Cold War, Demon Souls, Prey and Godfall.

Kotaku‘s own Stephen Totilo was unable to to run Black Ops on his PlayStation 5 due to this and just deleted the game. You will find many more cases like this all over twitter.

Apparently the first screen was so confusing that even my PS5 couldn’t handle it. Shut down twice, rebuilding the storage each time. Just going to wipe the whole game from my drive for now. pic.twitter.com/I0pJSlgOlw

— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo) November 16, 2020

The exact cause of this malfunction is yet to be determined but the leading theory is that it has something to do with Rest mode. Giant Bomb‘s Jeff Gerstmann has said that entering Rest Mode while the game is running will crash the whole system, and force the PS5 to repair its external drive.

Also every time I've had the PS5 go through that external drive repair sequence, it ends up on a black screen. I have to hit the power button on the console itself to force it into rest mode, then it comes back up and asks me to file an error report, then boots normally.

— Jeff Gerstmann (@jeffgerstmann) November 11, 2020

This is a possible cause but players have reported facing this issue even after shutting off the system. Another cause could be overheating, since that often leads to crashes like this. However there has been no heat related error report onscreen when the console acted up and in many cases; the devices were said to be at moderate temperatures.

How to avoid crashing

We haven’t heard anything from Sony or Microsoft about what exactly is causing this or been provided any solution. Both companies will most likely be releasing an update soon to fix these issues and although we still don’t know a guaranteed fix, you should take some precautions:

• Go to Settings and open the Power Saving tab
• Select Set Time Until PS5 Enter Rest Mode
• Set this to Don’t Put in Rest Mode

This will keep your system from sleeping automatically after a certain amount of time. Also keep a close eye on your console’s temperature. If you feel it heating up then you must immediately shut it down from the home screen and then unplug it once it is completely off.

Until we hear from Sony and Microsoft about how to proceed next, this is the only measure we can take to avoid crashing or bricking our systems.