After the last time that PSN went down for a significant length of time, it's no surprise that Sony wants us all to know that this time it's intentional. The official PlayStation Blog brings word of a major upcoming outage tomorrow for the PlayStation Network that it says is expected to last around 13 hours.

We will be performing routine scheduled maintenance on the network on Monday, April 16th, starting at approximately 6:00 am PDT / 9:00 am EDT. This maintenance will last roughly 13 hours, concluding around 7:00pm PDT / 10:00 pm EDT. During much of this time, users won’t be able to access the PlayStation Store, PlayStation Home, Account Management or play online. PSN enabled websites will not be able to service users, including this one.

For Australians, those times equate to 11pm Monday April 16th AEST to 12 noon on Tuesday AEST. While we imagine this is not something that Sony would do lightly, an outage of that length for a service used by so many seems embarrassingly excessive. It's hard to imagine the techs at Gmail, Youtube or Steam requiring a planned outage for that long. If there's any merit to the rumours of games on the next PlayStation console requiring online activation, then they're going to have to do a lot better than this.

Concerned PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita owners are encouraged to keep their eyes on the official PlayStation Twitter feed as the most authoritative source for updates on the outage.