system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 what is going on when a server (such as the playstation network) "goes down"? And what exactly are they doing when they're fixing it?

The playstation network is down and it's cold out and well, I'm curious: What exactly is happening when a server is down or "hacked" and what are they physically doing inside the computer (or internet, I'm sorry if this is a stupid way to word it) to fix that issue? Thanks!
gpt
Imagine your playstation is a phone, and the "server" is like your friends phone.  You want to call your friend to play a game of 20 questions, and you call, but they don't pick up.  They might not pick up for a bunch of reasons, like  
* they're sleeping (planned maintenance outage)  
* their phone battery died (unplanned maintenance outage)  
* they dropped the phone in a pool (hardware problem)  
* some one stole their phone and is using it to do bad things (hackers).