Update

: Sony has confirmed via its forums that tomorrow's planned maintenance period for PSN will indeed affect North America as well as other territories.

Sony notes that "In order to continue to deliver you the best online games experience, we will be performing maintenance on the network this Thursday, July 26th. This maintenance will start at approximately 8:00 am PDT (9:00am MDT / 10:00am CDT /11:00 am EDT) and end around 11:00pm PDT on Thursday, July 26th (1:00am MDT / 2:00am CDT / 3:00am EDT on Friday, July 27th)." These times fall in line with the previously-reported times underneath this update.The original story is below.

According to the European PlayStation Blog , the PlayStation Network is set for “scheduled maintenance” that will occur beginning on Thursday, July 26th. The maintenance will last for 16 hours.The times listed for Europe (BST) are 4pm Thursday afternoon through 8am Friday morning. That translates to 8am on Thursday through midnight Friday morning (PT).During the planned maintenance period, the PlayStation Store will be down for all platforms, as will account management and registration. However, Sony does note that “if you wish to play online during the maintenance, then you may be able to do so if you sign into the PSN before the start of the maintenance window.”The US PlayStation Blog has yet to comment on the planned maintenance period, but chances are this outage will affect the entirety of Sony’s worldwide PlayStation Network. However, we’re still waiting for confirmation on that front and will update when we hear more.

Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.