PS5 Jailbreak: What Relapse Offers and What You Risk

Relapse, a PS5 jailbreak released on September 29, 2026, works on firmware 7.00 to 13.60, including on the PS5 Pro. It lets the console run homebrew (unofficial, fan-made) apps and emulators, and Kotaku warned that it "may have just opened the floodgates to piracy."

The downside is the risk to the owner. Under Sony's rules, jailbreaking can get both the PSN account and the console itself banned. According to Tom's Hardware, updates for some new games already require firmware that Relapse doesn't support. The same could happen with GTA 6, which launches on November 19.

We explain what Relapse lets you do, what limitations remain on a jailbroken PS5, and what risks come with bypassing its security. We also examine Sony's rules, potential problems with running new games, and the legal issues surrounding console jailbreaking.

Soon after Relapse came out, well-known modder Lance McDonald wrote on X: "New PlayStation 5 jailbreak just dropped. Every PS5 console can now be jailbroken except ones updated in the past week or so. Huge." His post was viewed 2.9 million times. In practice, Relapse works only on firmware 7.00 to 13.60.

What we know about the jailbreak:

Firmware 14.00 came out on September 16, and Relapse went public 13 days later, on September 29. Sony hasn't said that 14.00 was meant to close this particular security hole, but consoles on the newer version can't be jailbroken with Relapse.

The authors call Relapse a research project and say it "does not endorse piracy." They also warn that using it can cause system instability, data loss and account bans.

The jailbreak doesn't install anything by itself. It only lets the console run unofficial software, and what happens next depends on that software.

Homebrew and emulators. Emulators for other consoles get the most attention. Two days before Relapse came out, a Switch emulator was already running on PS5 consoles jailbroken on older firmware. Modern Vintage Gamer, a YouTuber who has covered console hacking for years, wrote in the description of one of his videos that Relapse "re-invigorated the PS5 homebrew scene with many new native emulators."

Pirated games. This is what Kotaku's warning is about: a jailbroken console can be used to run pirated copies. But whether a particular game runs depends on which firmware version the game and its patches need. On October 5, it emerged that a group of developers is preparing what it calls a pirate PS Store for jailbroken PS5 consoles. The store isn't available yet.

What the jailbreak can't do. It can't install games and updates that need firmware newer than 13.60. Tom's Hardware, citing players, reports that a patch for the digital version of Marvel's Wolverine already requires firmware 14.00, which Relapse doesn't support.

Besides crashes and data loss, which the Relapse authors warn about, owners can lose access to everything tied to the PlayStation Network (PSN). No bans for Relapse have been reported so far, but Sony's rules allow them.

Account bans and console bans. The PlayStation Network Terms of Service prohibit circumventing the console's security. Under these terms, Sony can restrict, suspend or terminate both an account and the console itself, with or without notice. These are two different penalties:

A console ban isn't lifted when the console is sold. Asked on the same support page whether a suspension on a second-hand console can be lifted, Sony gives a one-word answer: "No." If a previous owner jailbroke the console and it was banned, the ban carries over to the new owner. To check a used PS5, ask the seller to sign in to PSN in front of you. If the console reports a suspension and no account can sign in on it, but the same accounts sign in fine on a computer, the console itself is most likely banned.

Updates and GTA 6. GTA 6 launches on November 19, and according to Notebookcheck and TweakTown, which cite the PlayStation Game Size account, it may require firmware 14.10. Neither Sony nor Rockstar has confirmed this. The PS5 system software license agreement says you must install the latest system software "as soon as you reasonably can" and prohibits reinstalling earlier versions. As long as a console runs 13.60 or older, games and patches that need 14.00 won't install on it. Sony also warns that without updating, you might not be able to use some apps or content, even if the console isn't banned.

Security. A jailbreak is someone else's code running with special system privileges. According to the French blog Korben, some ways of launching the jailbreak depend on third-party servers whose owners are unknown.

It depends on the country, and the law usually treats people who jailbreak their own consoles differently from those who sell hacking tools or modding services.

United States. Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) states that "no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work" protected by copyright. A rights holder can sue for actual damages or for statutory damages, which range from $200 to $2,500 per act of circumvention, as the court considers just. Criminal penalties of up to $500,000 or five years in prison for a first offense apply only when a violation is willful and committed for commercial advantage or private financial gain.

Every three years, the Librarian of Congress grants temporary exemptions on the Copyright Office's recommendation, but none covers owners who want to jailbreak a console to run their own software. In 2012, the Office declined to recommend such an exemption. The current rules allow circumventing console protection only in narrow cases, such as when an eligible library, archive or museum needs to do so to preserve games.

European Union. The EU's 2001 copyright directive requires member states to provide "adequate legal protection" against circumventing effective technological measures (Article 6). In 2014, in a case Nintendo brought against a seller of circumvention devices, the EU Court of Justice ruled that such measures can include protection built into consoles. The court added that legal protection must be proportionate and that national courts may consider how often circumvention devices are actually used to infringe copyright and how often they are used for lawful purposes.

United Kingdom. A person who circumvents effective technological measures protecting copyright works other than computer programs can be sued by the rights holder. The criminal offenses include making circumvention devices for sale or hire, importing them other than for private and domestic use, selling them in the course of a business, providing circumvention services as a business, and distributing such devices or services, even for free, on a scale that harms the rights holder.

Who has actually been prosecuted. The known criminal cases in the US and the UK have targeted people who sold devices or modded consoles for money. In the US, prosecutors charged a man who modified Xbox 360 consoles for money, but dropped the case in 2010, shortly after the trial began. In the UK, the Court of Appeal in 2009 upheld the conviction of a man who imported, advertised and sold modchips (small chips that let consoles run unauthorized software) as a business.

The PS5 launched on November 12, 2020, and the first public exploit arrived less than two years later. But for almost six years, every public jailbreak worked only on firmware that was already out of date, offered only limited access or took a lot of time and effort. A console kept up to date stayed locked, and it still does: Relapse doesn't work on 14.00 either. There are three reasons.

An extra layer of security. The PS5 runs a separate security layer on top of its operating system: even after the system itself is compromised, this layer stops anyone from changing the system's code. What's more, the console's system code can't be read, so hackers look for vulnerabilities almost blind. In the abstract for a 2024 talk, security researcher SpecterDev wrote that a way to break into the PS5's core system had long been public, while the security layer above it had held up on every firmware version. In the talk, he showed how to get around that layer, but only on firmware up to 2.50.

Mandatory updates. Once Sony learns about a vulnerability, it usually patches it in an update, and anyone who wants to play new games has to install that update sooner or later.

Sony pays for bugs. Sony has run a bug bounty program since 2020. It now covers both the PS4 and the PS5: according to HackerOne, which hosts the program, Sony pays at least $50,000 for a critical vulnerability and smaller sums for minor ones. Nintendo has had a similar program since 2016, and since 2017 the program has also covered the Switch. Many researchers have reported their findings directly to Sony. The best-known example is TheFloW, who was a security engineer at Google at the time. He received $20,000 from Sony for one of the flaws he found and described it publicly only after Sony had released a fix. In September 2026, TheFloW said he was stopping his project to run Linux on the PS5 because the flaw it relied on had reached Sony through the same bounty program.

Which PS5 firmware versions were hacked, and when:

On the last day of 2025, there were reports that the secret keys the PS5 uses to check its system at startup had leaked. This hasn't been confirmed, and no jailbreak based on them has appeared.

Relapse nearly reaches the latest firmware: only 14.00 and the October 1 update, 14.10, are out of its reach.

Hackers eventually broke into every PlayStation, and Sony responded differently each time.

PS1, PS2 and PSP. According to Hackaday, the first PlayStation modchips appeared about a year and a half after the console launched. These were tiny boards soldered inside the console. At first people installed them to play games from other regions, and later to play copied discs. Developers started building protection into the games themselves. Spyro: Year of the Dragon checked whether it was running as a cracked copy, and according to Gavin Dodd of Insomniac Games, it stayed uncracked for more than two months. The previous Spyro game was cracked in just over a week. In 2007, hackers found a new way around the handheld PSP's protection: according to Engadget, a modified battery put the console into a service mode meant for repairs.

Sony started going to court during the PS1 era. In 1999, it sued the makers of a PS1 emulator for computers, but in 2000 an appeals court sided with them, as the US Copyright Office notes in its case summary. In 2002 and 2004, according to The Register and the law firm Pinsent Masons, Sony won cases in the UK against sellers of PS2 modchips.

PS3: the most famous case. The PS3 had an official feature called OtherOS that let owners install Linux. In January 2010, George Hotz, known as geohot, used it to reach a protected part of the system, and on April 1 Sony removed OtherOS with an update, citing security concerns. Owners filed a class-action lawsuit, and in 2016, according to PCWorld, Sony agreed to pay $55 each to owners who could prove they had used Linux on the console.

The first widely available PS3 jailbreak came out in late summer 2010 and needed a special USB device. The PS3 had held out for 3 years and 9 months. In December, the fail0verflow group revealed a critical mistake Sony had made. Sony adds a digital signature to its official software so the console can tell it apart from unofficial programs. Each signature needs a new random number, but Sony kept using the same one. Because of that, the secret key Sony used to sign software could be calculated. A few days later, on January 3, 2011, Hotz published the PS3's secret key.

On January 11, Sony sued Hotz and members of fail0verflow. According to the court's final judgment, Sony accused Hotz and others of violating the DMCA and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and Hotz denied the allegations. Sony and Hotz settled at the end of March and announced the settlement in April: he agreed never to hack Sony products again, and the financial terms were not disclosed. In a statement on the PlayStation Blog, Hotz said he had never wanted to cause problems for users or enable piracy. Sony's lawyer Riley Russell said in the same post that the company had brought the lawsuit to protect its intellectual property and its users.

Vita and PS4. The Vita lasted 4 years and 7 months before its first widely available jailbreak, and the PS4 lasted 4 years and 1 month. The PS4 jailbreak arrived in late 2017 on firmware 4.05, after Sony had already released 5.00. New PS4 jailbreaks kept appearing for years, as recently as 2026.

For comparison: the Switch. In April 2018, researcher Kate Temkin and, separately, the fail0verflow group revealed a flaw in the code permanently built into the NVIDIA chip that boots the Switch. This code can't be fixed with an update, so every console already shipped, more than 14.8 million of them, became permanently vulnerable, according to Ars Technica. Nintendo had to start producing consoles with a corrected chip.

Nintendo has sued emulator developers and sellers of hacking devices, and such sellers have also been prosecuted: the US Department of Justice announced that one of the leaders of a group that sold such devices was sentenced in 2022 to 40 months in prison and ordered to pay Nintendo $4.5 million. The developers of the Yuzu emulator shut the project down in 2024 and agreed to pay Nintendo $2.4 million, Engadget reported, citing court documents.

Supporters of jailbreaking argue for owners' right to control their own consoles and games. According to the Video Game History Foundation, 87% of classic games released in the US before 2010 are no longer commercially available. The foundation says players have few options: track down vintage collectible games and hardware; travel to a library; or pirate the games. It considers none of these a good option.

Supporters also point to Sony's own decisions. In July 2026, Sony announced that it will stop producing discs for new PlayStation games starting in January 2028. It also said the PS3 and Vita stores will stop accepting purchases by July 2027. In a class-action lawsuit, the company argued that buyers of digital games receive a license to them, not ownership. Popular YouTuber YongYea summed up this side's position: jailbreaking lets players make backups and keep access to their games, while Sony, by dropping discs, is taking that option away. More on this in The End of Game Ownership? Why PlayStation Is Abandoning Discs.

Many well-known hackers say they oppose piracy, and so do the authors of Relapse. In 2011, fail0verflow wrote that it had never supported or condoned piracy and had not published Sony's secret keys.

Opponents of jailbreaking say that in practice it leads to piracy. When the US Copyright Office declined in 2012 to recommend an exemption for jailbreaking consoles to run lawfully acquired software, it found that opponents had made "a strong case, supported by substantial evidence in the record," that circumventing console restrictions, "even when initially undertaken for salutary purposes," is "inextricably linked to and tends to foster piracy."

The Entertainment Software Association warned back in 2015 that game preservation could be used as cover for giving games away. A January 2025 report by the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a coalition of copyright industry groups, says the video game industry regularly asks online marketplaces to remove listings for modified consoles and circumvention tools used to play pirated games.

People who have never touched a jailbreak can be affected as well. In September, cheaters using jailbroken PS4 consoles appeared in GTA 5's online mode, playing as invulnerable and invisible characters. According to dataminer Tex2, honest players can be banned if a cheater drops billions of in-game dollars on them or boosts their rank.

What we know about the harm from piracy. Studies disagree on whether, and how much, piracy cuts sales. A 2024 study of 86 PC games protected by Denuvo anti-tamper software estimated that when the protection is cracked soon after release, a game's total revenue drops by about 20%. A report prepared for the European Commission in 2015 and published in 2017 found no evidence that piracy reduces game sales, and publishers disagreed with its conclusions.

Relapse works only on firmware 7.00 to 13.60. A jailbroken PS5 can run homebrew apps and emulators, but games and patches that need newer firmware won't install on it. Even games that don't need newer firmware aren't guaranteed to run. Owners also risk a PSN ban. In the US, no exemption covers circumventing a console's protection to run your own software.

Sony hasn't commented on Relapse and, as far as we know, hasn't demanded that the project be taken down. No lawsuits by Sony against PS5 hackers have been reported. Sony still controls updates, the PlayStation Store and PSN.

GTA 6 launches on November 19, and there's no official word yet on which firmware it will need. If the game needs firmware newer than 13.60, the current version of Relapse won't be compatible with it.

Short answers to common questions about the PS5 jailbreak.

Not with any public jailbreak as of October 7, 2026: none exists for 14.00 or 14.10. Relapse works only on firmware 7.00 to 13.60.

Yes. Under the PSN Terms of Service, Sony can ban both the account and the console. No bans for Relapse specifically have been reported so far. According to PlayStation Support, a console ban stays in place even after the console is sold.

It lets the console run homebrew apps and emulators for other systems. Kotaku warned that it may also open the door to pirated games. Games and updates that need firmware newer than 13.60 won't install.

It depends on the country. In the US, the DMCA bans circumventing technological measures that control access to copyrighted works, and there is no exemption for console owners who want to run their own software. Rights holders can sue, but criminal penalties apply only to willful violations for commercial advantage or private financial gain. EU law also protects technological measures. In the UK, the criminal offenses include making circumvention devices for sale, importing them other than for personal use, trading in them or in circumvention services as a business, and distributing them on a scale that harms the rights holder. Known criminal cases in the US and the UK have targeted sellers and people who modded consoles for money.

It's risky. Jailbreaking itself violates the PSN Terms of Service: Sony can ban both the account and the console for circumventing the console's security, and the Relapse authors warn about account bans. In addition, according to Tom's Hardware, patches for some new games require newer firmware, which the jailbreak doesn't support.

Ask the seller to sign in to PSN in front of you. If the console reports a suspension and no account can sign in on it, but the same accounts sign in fine on a computer, the console itself is most likely banned.