On the official Playstation forum, a Community Team coordinator announced that the European Playstation Network will have some downtime tomorrow. But fear not, it’s only for a very short period of time. The reason for the update is that they’re changing something in the Playstation Store.

What this means in practice is that you won’t be able to play online games, communicate with your friends and use the Playstation Store for approximately 3 hours. However, if you’re in a game at the moment, it’s very likely the game will continue, but you won’t be able to start a new one. The exact date and time is May 8th between 17:00 - 20:00 CEST, to calculate the time in your timezone you can check out this website for example.

This Community Team Coordinator said that they’ll be making some “new and exciting” changes to the Playstation Store, but what they’ll be changing exactly is unknown. Let’s hope it’s the horrible layout, speed and the content which is pretty bad compared to the US equivalent.

Over the next few weeks, some new and exciting changes will take place in the PLAYSTATION®Store. In preparation for this, both PLAYSTATION®Network and PLAYSTATION®Store need to be taken offline for a short while to allow us to carry out the upgrade and maintenance work.

This is scheduled to take place between 16:00 and 19:00 BST (17:00-20:00 CEST) on Tuesday 8th May 2007.

If you are already logged into an online game during this time, you will most likely find that you can continue playing as normal, but you will not be able to log in or start a new game until full service has been restored. You will also not be able to access the Store during this maintenance window.

We are hoping to complete this work in as short a time as possible and apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. But remember that these enhancements are paving the way for new and exciting content that we have planned for the Store!

Thanks to Lotus 111s for submitting this news.