A brief press release from Rockstar today confirms that the server issues which had been causing the PS3 version of GTA IV to stutter, lock up, and freeze has been resolved. While no specific reason was given for the disturbance, this news leads us to believe that the problem was with GameSpy’s servers, and not an inherent flaw in the game’s coding. Hopefully, players will now see improved performance and an end to those heartbreaking frozen screens.

Previous attempts to resolve the problem forced gamers to do everything from erase all their game data to disable autosaving and Internet connectivity. Now it appears that owners will be able to play the game with full functionality restored to their consoles, and no special steps need to be taken aside from downloading a simple 18 MB update.

We’ll continue to monitor the situation to see if this is a permanent fix, but in the meantime kudos to Rockstar for identifying the source of the problem and resolving it in slightly over a week from launch. Hopefully now we will see fewer furious gamers flooding message boards with tales of broken game woe, and instead there will be furious gamers flooding message boards for getting killed by noob tubes in the Cops and Crooks multiplayer.