Sony has announced that it will be having yet another mass PSN outage tomorrow which will last approximately 12 hours on January the 17th.
Now as per usual this is not an issue for Sony – merely that the company is putting in place some updates and security improvements for the start of 2013, which are regularly needed to keep the PSN up and running.
In a statement Sony wrote:
“Hi everyone! 2013 is off to a roaring start here on PSN, with tons of great games and promotions for PlayStation gamers, from the God of War: Ascension Multiplayer Beta for PlayStation Plus users, to the recent digital release ofPS3 favorite Demon’s Souls, to pre-orders going live for the digital version of Dead Space 3.”
The routine maintenance will begin on January 17th and will start at approximately 8:00AM PT (9:00AM MT / 10:00AM CT / 11:00 AM ET) and last until around 8:00PM PT (9:00PM MT / 10:00PM CT / 11:00PM ET).
During this period users will not be able to access the PlayStation Store and Account Management sections of PSN but if you sign into the PSN anytime between now and tomorrow’s outage then you will be able to access online play and apps. So, if you haven’t signed into PSN and want to game online tomorrow then you best sign in before the maintenance starts.
Sony schedule a few of these routine maintenance outages across the year and after 2010’s mass outage you can see why it takes great care to do this. It’s still a bit odd that Sony has these outages when Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console will do the same without the outages, but that’s just something we wonder from time to time.