PlayStation Network To Undergo Maintenance On January 15th

Take heed, PlayStation owners, as Sony has outlined exactly when it will be taking the PlayStation Network offline for a bout of maintenance.

Set to last for a four-hour period, the service will be brought down at 9am PT/12pm ET/17:00 GMT before returning to normal functionality at 1pm PT/4pm ET/21:00 GMT — providing all goes according to plan.

Undoubtedly, this scheduled maintenance is a result of the problems that have beleaguered the PlayStation Network since the festive period, and even now the status page still displays “heavy traffic.”

Sony detailed the upcoming maintenance via the PlayStation Blog:

For the duration of the maintenance you will be unable to log in to Account Management and the PS Store. PS Home will also be unavailable. PS4 users will be unable to access the ‘What’s New’ feed, ‘Live Items’ or their ‘Library’. ‘Share’ features will also be affected by the maintenance. The majority of other features such as online gaming, the Friends List, Parties, messaging and video/music services should be available.

PS3 and PS Vita users may experience limited PSN functionality, however online gameplay will be available to users who have recently signed into their SEN account and have their authentication details cached.

Those players who have signed into PSN recently should be able to proceed as normal, whether it’s playing games online or accessing the console’s media applications such as Netflix. Mind you, other services on the system including PS Store, PlayStation Home — I know, I didn’t realize it was still live either — and the Account Management tab will be inaccessible during the downtime.

We’ll keep you posted on the progress of the scheduled maintenance closer to the time, but you should still plan accordingly if you intended to access PlayStation Network on Thursday, January 15th.