After over a month of waiting for the network to come back up, and days of trying to log into it just to receive error messages, I finally managed to login and checkout the Welcome Back Offer. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of downloading the welcome back offer (yes it is downloadable) just to realise that then removed all my options to download the free games!

So, whether or not this is a result of what I did or a system wide bug, I am not sure. Will do a bit of searching and find out what is going on. I did however manage to join up for the 30 day free playstation plus offer.

Update:

Thanks to DryEarth.com for posting up a workaround to this problem – http://www.dryearth.com/playstation-welcome-back-missing-free-game/

Have to access from the playstation account management section. Logical… See link above for detailed instructions.