In the middle of the hype for Gamescom, the PlayStation Blog snuck in the announcement that PlayStation Network is going through scheduled maintenance this Thursday, August 22, from 12 noon to 6:30 PM Pacific Time. If you try to access PSN within this time frame, you will get a simple maintenance notification.
You will not be able to access the PlayStation Store, PlayStation Home or Account Management, but you can still use online play, as well as the apps. What you will need to do is sign into PSN anytime before now and when the scheduled maintenance starts.
Sony has been scheduling downtime frequently for some time now, and providing little explanation. Although disclosing the reasons for it is entirely up to them, keeping mum on it has led to common speculation that the company has been keeping tabs on and is relentlessly tracking down possible hacking attempts since the outage last April 2011. Based on what functionalities are going to be disabled and what will still be possible, this does seem to be the case for this instance as well.
At the time, the PSN hack was reported as the biggest Internet security break in to date. It took almost a month to bring back functionality, and Sony faced legal action in several countries, as well as criticism for not reporting the breach in a timely manner. Today, Sony’s terms and conditions protects it from future lawsuits.
At the dawn of a new generation of consoles increasingly dependent on online functionality, it’s important to remember that this function brings with it such drawbacks as downtime, and worse, security risks.
Source: PlayStation
