The PlayStation Store will be down for maintenance for an ever-so-slightly inconvenient nine hours on Thursday - but it appears online play will still be available.

Sony has confirmed that the service will be out of action between 15.30 BST Thursday and 00.30 on Friday morning.

"During this time you will not be able to access services such as the PlayStation Store, Account Management or Registration," Sony said today. "We apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause."

You damn right it will cause inconvenience, you loveable rogues.

Still, at least it'll all be over in time for the release of multiplayer favourites Rock Band 3 and WWE Smackdown Vs Raw 2011 on the system this Friday.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/ar ... ?id=271604

What really peeves me off is that the entire PSN is down frequently, and is usually down during evening time in the UK, completely ruining your evening of online gaming with mates.

I really hope online gameplay will be unaffected.

They certainly don't seem to give it much thought... Wouldn't happen with Apple you know

To be fair to them, it's less inconvenient than it might have been given they've moved the weekly PSN update to Wednesday. And as long as you can log in and play online, are the majority of users actually going to notice all that much?

Having said that, doing it worldwide to the same schedule is indeed stupid. They should really do the far east, EU and USA to 'local' schedules. And it won't cure the main problem with PSN which is the utterly terrible download speeds from the shop.

Jon

Yes but those hours probably have the least impact on its main markets the US and Asia. This would minimise the impact on the majority of its users.

+1, it used to be you'd leave the PS3 on and go and do something else to get a download. Now I find myself starting a download and getting it over a few days in the background, when I've been playing COD or watching iPlayer