GAME/SERVER/STATUS
PlayStation 4 error

PlayStation 4 CE-34878-0

On screen: An error occurred with the game/application.

This one is on your side

This error is produced locally. It does not appear because the service is down, so the fixes below are worth working through in order.

What it actually means

Sony publishes the on-screen line and nothing more. There is no official explanation of the cause — the page is the message plus a list of steps. That is worth knowing before you read anyone's confident diagnosis of it.

In practice it is the console or the game crashing, and which one depends entirely on whether it follows you between games.

This code is PS4 only. Sony's PS5 index does not contain it; the PS5 equivalent is CE-108255-1.

How to tell which one you have

One question settles it. Does it happen in several different games, or only in one? Across multiple games points at the console. In a single game it is that game, and the fix is its update rather than anything on this list.

Before you change anything

If the error repeats across different games, often alongside graphical artefacts, repair communities such as iFixit and TronicsFix attribute it to degraded solder under the APU rather than to software. That is their observation and not Sony's position, and we flag it because it matters: in that scenario initialising the console erases your data and changes nothing.

Fixes, in the order worth trying

  1. Update the system software and the game — Sony's first step, and the order matters — everything below is more invasive.
  2. Restart the console
  3. Disconnect the PlayStation Camera and turn off Face Recognition — This looks irrelevant and is in Sony's own list. Worth doing before anything destructive.
  4. If you replaced the hard drive, put the original back — Sony lists this explicitly. A drive that is failing or unsupported produces exactly this.
  5. Initialise the PS4 — last, and it erases everything — Settings, Initialisation, Initialize PS4. Sony puts this fifth of seven, after everything above. Any page that leads with it is being more destructive than Sony's own documentation.
  6. PlayStation Repairs — Sony's final step, and for the hardware pattern below it is the correct one.

On PS5 the equivalent code is CE-108255-1, and Sony's page for it is even shorter.

Operator documentation: www.playstation.com. Two things about this source are worth stating. Sony gives no cause at all, only steps. And Rebuild Database — which is the headline fix on most pages targeting this code — does not appear anywhere in Sony's article. We are not going to present it as Sony's advice.

Common questions

What does PlayStation 4 CE-34878-0 mean?

Sony publishes the on-screen line and nothing more. There is no official explanation of the cause — the page is the message plus a list of steps. That is worth knowing before you read anyone's confident diagnosis of it.

Is PlayStation 4 CE-34878-0 an outage?

This error is produced locally. It does not appear because the service is down, so the fixes below are worth working through in order.

How do I fix PlayStation 4 CE-34878-0?

Start with: Update the system software and the game. Sony's first step, and the order matters — everything below is more invasive.