Sony announced today that it plans to take the Playstation Network offline for 14 hours on Thursday to perform essential work to the network.
The downtime has been scheduled for 4pm on Thurday until the Friday morning at 6am. It means that all users, including new members with a PS Vita, will be unable to play online, make purchases or use any of the services from the Playstation Network temporarily.
This will be the third time in as many months that Sony has taken the network fully offline, and will bring back bad memories for users who suffered a month offline due to hackers last year.
A post on the Official Playstation Blog says that this particular outage will see the PSN become a completely no access zone.
The official announcement reads: “Unlike typical maintenance events, consumers who are already signed-in to PSN will be signed-out, and consumers will be unable to sign in for the duration of the maintenance window.
“During this time, users won’t be able to access the PlayStation Store, PlayStation Home, Account Management or play online.”
It’s obviously a bit of a blow for anyone who has picked up a PS Vita this week or is planning a day of gaming on Thursday, but it’s clear that Sony is taking its responsibilities much more seriously after the uproar created from last year’s outage.
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