Thursday's PSN maintenance window to affect US, PAL territories

Sony has announced that a scheduled maintenance window this week will extend beyond Europe.

Previously (very quietly) flagged for the European network, the maintenance window has now been confirmed on both the US and EU PS blogs.

The outage will affect the Arab Emirates, Australia, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and the US. The US blog doesn't give a breakdown by country, but presumably the whole North American arm will be down, affecting Canada and Mexico, too.

The maintenance window begins on Thursday February 2, at 2.00PM GMT/9:00AM EST/6:00AM PST/1:00AM AEST (February 3), and is expected to be at least 17 hours long.

The PlayStation Store, account management and registration will be unavailable during the outage, and you won't be able to log in - but if you're already logged in before the maintenance begins, your session will continue.

Sony has given no explanation beyond maintenance, and it's the second such outage in as many weeks.