PSN scheduled for maintenance on November 17th, but there is a way to keep playing

The Play Station Network is scheduled to go down on Monday, November 17th for its routine maintenance. The network will be down for about six hours and the down time will start from 10am to 4pm Pacific Time, and 1pm to 7pm Eastern. But in this update things are going to be a little different. There is in fact a way to keep playing games and access various services during the downtime. All you need to do is sign in any time between today and Monday on your PlayStation and this way you will be able to carry on playing games online. So players don’t have to worry about being bored stiff till the PSN is back up again.

Access to third-party apps such as Youtube and Netflix will also be available. The only things you won’t be able to access during the maintenance is the PlayStation Home, the PlayStation store, and Account Management. Here is the full notice issued by Sony:

We wanted to take a moment to inform you of a network maintenance, currently scheduled for Monday the 17th, from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM Pacific Time (1:00 PM to 7:00 PM Eastern Time). We expect this maintenance to last approximately 6 hours. During this time we will deploy a series of back-end improvements to the network.

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.