PSN Going Down For Maintenance This Week

For the second time in as many weeks, Sony is taking the PlayStation Network offline so it can perform some overnight maintenance.

If you were planning to take your PS3 online (or use your PSN account at all) on Thursday, you may want to make some alternate plans. Sony has announced that the PlayStation Network will be going down from Thursday afternoon to Friday morning, all in the name of maintenance. As a result, several services will be unavailable during the downtime.

According to the the European PlayStation Blog:

PSN Maintenance has been scheduled to take place this Thursday 2nd of February from 14.00PM until 08.00AM on Friday 3rd of February.

During the maintenance period, the following services will be affected:

PS Store (PC and Console)
Customer Account Management
Registration
HOME will be unavailable for the duration of the maintenance.

Users who attempt to sign in after maintenance begins may receive the site notification page. If you are signed in before maintenance begins you should remain signed into your online session (although the above services will still be unavailable).

While your game session will apparently go on uninterrupted (provided you're signed in when the PSN goes down), it doesn't sound like you'll be able to go online after the maintenance begins.

Source: EU PlayStation Blog