Many gamers have been reporting patchy online performance from Gran Turismo 5 in the last couple of days, with random disconnects from online lobbies and “Error Code: 268″ when trying to join. There was even a succinct message added to the in-game news feed yesterday afternoon:

Online Service Interruption

We are currently experiencing an interruption of the Gran Turismo 5 online service.
We apologise for the inconvenience and ask for your patience while we work to restore the service.

Though many suspect the culprit to be most recent game update, the reason appears to be more physical in nature – although Kazunori Yamauchi has Tweeted that he’s not entirely sure what the problem is – and Polyphony Digital are working on the repairs.

The issue seems to affect certain users more than others with no direct link between the effect and the users’ location. Unfortunately this gives gamers little else to do than await good news – which we’ll bring you as soon as we get it.

I used to do that before every race night and it'd often take several seconds to complete. But somewhere along the line it seems PD did something to eliminate that issue as there never seems to be anything in the cache to delete now. It finishes immediately.