This just in! A PSN community leader has confirmed that the PlayStation Network will experience a downtime tomorrow due to system maintenance. Ok. Fair enough. Sounds pretty tame as announcements go, right? So what makes this announcement exciting? Let's review, shall we?

Fact #1: Back in TGS, Sony announced that the PSP Store will go live in Japan by October 15. It's also been confirmed that PSP FW 5.00 will be required to access the PSP Store.

Fact #2: We earlier heard Eric Lempel confirm the list of features for the upcoming firmware updates for the PSP and PS3. Since the PSP Store will go live with the corresponding PSP FW 5.00, he announced that, "The current PlayStation Store on the PC will be down in the interim as we take some time to revamp. Don’t worry, it will re-launch soon after we’ve made some tweaks."

Fact #3: The PSN EU community leader already confirmed that the PlayStation Network will experience a downtime tomorrow, October 14 at 02:00. This will be due to system maintenance. PSN will then be accessible once again by October 15, at 02:00. It is unclear if this is only applicable for PSN EU or for all networks.

Now is it just me, or are there connections between these three facts? Could we be seeing the new firmware updates and the PSP Store by Thursday? If you were to mince words, you could say all three facts are completely unrelated because they discuss about different regions (Japan, US, and Europe) and networks (PS3 Store, PC Store, PSP Store).

Speculate all we might as of this moment, rest assured we'll give you updates once Sony drops the big one on us!

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