SlashGear

Sony have confirmed that Playstation Home will be offline for approximately six hours today, as the interactive environment is updated from software version 1.03 to 1.04.  The update will begin at 12 midnight PST, during which time it will be unaccessible to users, with Sony claiming that the change is intended to reduce connection issues.

In the process, the voice chat functionality within Playstation Home will be disabled.  Sony have not made public their reasons for this, but a fair assumption might be that the bandwidth and server capacity used to handle voice data is being re-prioritized to make room for more users logging in.

Text chatting is still functional in 1.04, and Sony do apparently intend to bring voice chatting back, though no precise timescale has been given.  Home launched on December 11th, and was made available to PS3 users worldwide rather than in a more typical progressive roll-out.  The service subsequently experienced ongoing connection problems, with some users unable to register and access it at all, and others suffering premature disconnections.