Change Your Message Settings to Private Immediately
It looks like PS4 users are getting soft-locked out of their consoles by a mysterious message. There are many stories of this happening, all with a common thread: Get the message, have your controller and audio outputs fail, fall into an endless error loop after the console is reset.
Some people claim you can do a factory reset to fix the issue, while others point to the Playstation mobile app as a place to delete the offending communication. Alternately, you can log in on a web browser to remove the message.
As a preventative measure, you can change your message settings to private. From Account Management, go to your privacy settings. In there, change your message settings to ‘Friends’ or ‘No-one.’ This will keep random users from sending you messages, as well as prevent malicious attacks on your inbox. This rash of attacks has only popped up over the weekend, so there’s no word from Sony about how bad this got or whether a more official solution is inbound. In the meanwhile, change those settings. No sense in resorting to a factory reset if you don’t absolutely have to perform one, you know?