Hoping to play one of the many AAA holiday games online tomorrow? Unfortunately, it looks like you won’t be able to, as Sony has scheduled some downtime for the PlayStation Network for most of the day.
The downtime will be in both the US and Europe, with the network “offline for routine scheduled maintenance” in the US on Thursday, November 17th from approximately 8am until 10pm PST, and down from 4pm on Thursday 17 November until 2am GMT on Friday in Europe.
During that time, you won’t be able to access the following services:
- PlayStation Store on PS3 and PSP.
- PlayStation Network Account Management.
- PlayStation Network Account Registration.
Some users may be able to play online during the maintenance if they are signed in before it goes down, but the majority won’t be able to.
No reason was given for the rather long downtime, other than it being routine maintenance (Update: Sony previously warned of maintenance to implement changes that limit the number of game shares). With so many big games now out, Sony hasn’t chosen the best of times to do some backend work – especially considering it’ll be the 5th anniversary of the PS3 in the US.