14 DAY TRIAL // Video game publisher and hardware developer Sony has announced that a planned maintenance session which was supposed to only hit the European countries today has now been extended to also affect users who log in from the Arab Emirates, Australia, New Zeeland and the United States.
It is not clear whether users in Canada and Mexico, also on the North American continent, are exempted from the service outage, but it seems that they too might be affected, given the structure of announcements made on the US PlayStation blog.
The maintenance window for the PlayStation Network begins today at 2:00 PM Greenwich Mean Time, 9:00 AM Eastern Standard Time and 6:00 AM Pacific Standard Time.
Sony says that it expects the maintenance to last for at least 17 hours in all territories although there’s also a possibility that the planned operations might take longer.
The video game company mentions that the PlayStation Store, account registration and management will be unavailable during the period and that no user will be able to log in.
Those who are already using the PlayStation Network will stay logged, but services like Home might be unavailable depending on what Sony is doing with the service.
Sony has not offered a reason for the maintenance period, and there is no indication that the company plans to make an official announcement about new features for the PlayStation Network.
Recently, the company has detailed plans to make the PSN a hub for its online services, connecting gaming consoles with intelligent televisions sets, smartphones and tablets.
This probably requires significant upgrades to the network infrastructure in the coming months and more maintenance period might be planned, to the disappointment of some gamers.
The PSN is coming up on the one-year anniversary of the attacks that brought it down for more than one month starting with April 2011, and Sony might also be introducing new security features to make sure that no similar incidents happen.