Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE) (TYO:6758)’s Playstation Network went down on Monday morning and will remain down for about 5.5 hours because of scheduled maintenance. The maintenance will last from 11:30 am to 5:00 pm EST/8:30 am to 2:00 pm PST.
Playstation tweeted the following message to users:
Routine PSN maintenance Monday, 3/10 from 8:30am-2pm Pacific time: Log in prior to retain online play & app access
Details regarding the shut down
Users who have been signed on to the network since March 6th will still be able to play games, watch Netflix, or access applications. Users who haven’t logged on have to wait until the network reboots. Users will not be able to access Playstation Store, Account Management or Playstation Home during maintenance.
Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE) (TYO:6758) has yet to mention the reason for the current maintenance activities. Sony generally tries to schedule these outages during off-peak times. The game console maker also posted this message on the official forum, “We thank you for your patience and support and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. In order to access online gameplay and partner apps during this routine maintenance, we ask that you please sign into the network prior to [maintenance starting on Monday morning].”
Sony also mentioned users could experience brief outages after the maintenance period ends when the company’s engineers test out the changes.
Playstation Now coming soon
In other news regarding Sony Playstation, the company plans to soon offer a game subscription service similar to Netflix. The service, which will be dubbed Playstation Now, will let PS4 and PS Vita owners stream a wide variety of games on their devices from a back-end catalog of games from PS3, PS2 and PS1. The service is predicted to roll out in North America later in 2014. Details of when it will launch in Europe are still unknown. The costs for the service are expected to vary by region. A recent post from Gaikai (a PS Now developer) shows Uncharted 3 will cost $4.99 and Far Cry 3 will cost $5.99.
