Sony has announced that it will knock PSN offline for around 90 minutes starting at 9:30 p.m. Pacific time tonight. Unlike previous outages, Sony claims this maintenance will not prevent anyone from playing online multiplayer games. In the past, only people who signed into their account in the week leading up to maintenance were able to continue playing over PSN. The downtime is also shorter than in the past, when Sony would take down its online infrastructure for up to four hours.
While you’ll still have access to online multiplayer during the outage, some aspects of PSN will not work. Account management, PlayStation Video, and the PlayStation Store will not load during the maintenance period.
Additionally, Sony is recommending that you set your personal PlayStation 4 as your “primary console.” This is an option in the settings, and it will ensure that you can get online even as Sony bangs away on the PSN servers with a mallet.
You can keep track of any further PSN outages or problems by checking Sony’s PlayStation Status website.