PSN down today in North America

US users who attempt to log into the Playstation Network today will not be a happy bunch. The network will be down all day long today for “maintenance”.

Senior Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media (wow), Patrick Seybold, announced today on the PS Blog that the network will be offline from 8am to 9pm Pacific (US) time. Which is a while.

Here’s what you won’t have access to today:

• PlayStation Store on PS3, PSP, and Media Go.
• PlayStation Network Account Management.
• PlayStation Network Account Registration.
• PlayStation Home
• Music Unlimited & Video Unlimited services

So… pretty much everything then? Yep- but, there’s a bright spot dear readers, because if you were already signed in to the network when it was taken offline, you get a special surprise!

Users who are already signed into their account on PlayStation Network before the start of the maintenance should be able to stay signed in to their online session, but will not be able to access any of the services listed above. Users who attempt to sign-in to their PlayStation Network account after the start of the maintenance may be presented with the site maintenance notification page if they haven’t signed in recently.
During this maintenance, you can continue to collect in-game Trophies and these will be updated on your profile once PlayStation Network is back up and running.

I know what you’re thinking: WTF? Well, I don’t really know. Sony has no other explanation for the work than the dreaded ‘maintenance’ tag, so your guess is as good as mine. It is being reported around the interwebs that this is to setup for another major firmware update coming down the road- but as far as we’re aware, that hasn’t been confirmed.