The PlayStation Network is going down on Thursday, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the nasty business that went down last year.

Sony announced on the PlayStation blog that the PSN will be going down for “signficant maintenance” on Thursday, March 1. The maintenance will start around 8 a.m. PST and end around 10 p.m. PST.

What makes this maintenance period so significant? Sony isn’t saying, but they do say that it’s unique from other maintenance periods. If you are already signed into the PSN when it goes down for maintenance, you will be signed out. You will also not be able to sign in to the PSN during maintenance hours. Likewise, any Web site, including the PlayStation blog, that use the PSN for sign ins won’t work either.

Sony will keep people updated via their Twitter feed to when the PSN will be back online.

While nobody really knows what the maintenance is for, many of the comments on the blog post seem to think it’s for the Vita. A few users are reporting problems with the remote play option between the Vita and the PS3. That very well could be one of the issues being fixed in such a lengthy maintenance period.

The good thing about being a heavy PC gamer is that I have plenty of other options when the PSN goes down, but I will miss my nightly browsing of the PSN to see if Journey might have leaked onto the PSN.

So what are you going to do on Thursday with the PSN being down? Play some games on your brand new Vita? Let us know in the comments.