An announcement was made in the PlayStation Forums today that the service will be under maintenance on Monday the 17th from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM Pacific Time (12:00 PM to 6:00 PM Eastern Time) to deploy back end improvements to the network. The post doesn’t give many more details as to the specific changes, only saying:
If you’ve signed in to the network any time since November 13th, you will be able to play games online and access partner apps such as Netflix during this maintenance period. The PlayStation Store, PlayStation Home and Account Management will not be available during this time, and users may receive a maintenance notification when attempting to access these services.
We thank you for your patience and support and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Other users on the forum immediately raised concerns of whether or not this would effect the preloading of digitally purchased games that release the following Tuesday or not. Far Cry 4, Dragon Age: Inquisition and the re-release of GTA 5 are all widely anticipated games that come out the following day. The update time is only a 6 hour window, but GTA 5, for example, weighs in at a hefty 50GB installation–making that 6 hour window precious installation time lost for PS4 users with average bandwidth speeds.
The poster hasn’t responded yet and we’ll keep an ear to the ground on the topic, but we may just have to find out for ourselves next Monday.
