Sony has announced another one of its scheduled maintenance outages for the PlayStation Network that has been planned to last for five hours today (March 10th, 2014) that could see some gamers unable to play online.
Sony announced the maintenance on their official US PlayStation forums:
“We wanted to take a moment to inform you of a planned network maintenance, currently scheduled for Monday, March 10th from 8:30 AM to 2:00 PM Pacific Time (11:30 AM to 5:00 PM Eastern Time). We expect this maintenance to last approximately 5.5 hours.”
For gamers in the UK that means a GMT outage of 3.30pm (15:30) to 9pm (21:00) where the PSN and certain services will not be available.
As per usual with updates to the PSN, gamers who have signed in within the last 48 hours will still be able to access the online functionality of PSN, including partner apps such as well as the ability to play online games. If you don’t sign in before maintenance starts however, you’re stuck with offline gameplay and apps until the maintenance is over.
However, the PlayStation Store, PlayStation Home and Account Management sections will not be available during this time, and users may receive a maintenance notification when attempting to access these services.
If gamers haven’t logged in since March 8th they may not be able to access any of the PlayStation Network’s online features, but there is still some time before the outages starts so if you can log on, now is the time.