A reminder poster by Sony on the PSN website indicates that routine maintenance will affect PlayStation Network services early next week for a period of two hours.
Sony’s PlayStation Network services will be affected by routine maintenance next week, according to a reminder posted on the official PlayStation Networkwebsite. The routine maintenance will take place within a two hour time window starting at 9:30PM PST on Monday, April 18th, and while it won’t be the most invasive server update of recent times, it will affect gamers trying to navigate the digital storefronts provided by Sony.
While the maintenance is ongoing, players who already have a registered PSN account can still sign in to their account, play games, and use most of the applications while Sony is working behind the scenes. Those looking to make purchases from the PlayStation Video or PlayStation Store, however, won’t be so lucky as Sony explains:
Anyone who already has an account can still sign in to their PlayStation Network profile, play games, and use most applications while this maintenance is carried out. We apologize for any inconvenience. We strive to ensure that PlayStation Network services are available at all times, but occasionally we must take PlayStation Network offline to perform essential maintenance and implement feature enhancements.
Since gamers can still play games during this period, it’s unlikely that too many fans will be upset at the two hour repair window, which Sony says it is trying to reduce. The company also recommends that those who haven’t activated their PlayStation 4 as a primary console do so before the maintenance period, to ensure they’ll be able to keep playing games as the servers go through the update. To do this, players can go into their network profile, select Settings, PlayStation Network / Account Management, then click Activate as Your Primary PS4. For whatever reason, Sony suggests this will ensure gamers will still be able to whoop their friends atwhile the maintenance takes place.
The update follows shortly after Sony’s big PlayStation 4 firmware updatefrom earlier this month, which introduced plenty of previously unannounced features. Sony fans with PC and Mac computers can now utilize the long-awaited remote play feature, join game sessions with friends in a much faster manner, and can finally appear offline if they don’t want to be pestered with messages and invites while they play a game.
Sony last had major issues with the PlayStation Network months ago, with the company making amends for that unintentional downtime by extending the length of affected PSN subscriptions. This prompted Xbox Live spokesperson Larry Hryb to indicate that Microsoft might do the same thing at some pointafter network outages, but so far only Sony has put forth these gestures of forgiveness when it comes to network downtime.
Source: PlayStation Network