At least in Australia and only sort of working at the moment but I suspect its suddenly being hammered by thousands of people at once

Certainly good progress though.

It's back worldwide.

I'm getting tons of errors, though. Those aren't up just yet.

From what I've read, there'll be something called a welcome back package you download (or possibly a small custom shopfront category), I assume that it'll let you pick the free games in that

It's back, but not up to full speed at all. I keep getting random errors and I don't trust it enough to even consider buying anything.

damn it works sometimes getting errors most of the time here

Hyperdimension neptunia DLC :D

Love to have a real neptune :3

No it's not. As usual Sony Japan are dragging their feet in complying with government and credit company requests which has forced PSN to be taken offline here again. We got the ability to log in back for the grand total of 40 hours or so before it got pulled offline until further notice again.

In fact trying to reach the store in Japan now returns the message "You cannot use this service in your region".

They've regionally restricted themselves??

Not entirely, their refusal to offer the same fraud protection here that they are offering in the US has resulted in credit card companies demanding more proof that fraud is not likely (as they don't want to foot the bill) and government are joining in. Thus, they are under orders to not return the service. Something they pretty much have to comply with if they don't want to slapped with an order that will force them to cease trading for 6 months (and order that has been used several times in the past 5 years which has resulted in very large businesses going out of business entirely).

im geting the same errors everytime i try and download a demo, then after its brought them up it works, something certainly isnt right

Wow, I was beginning to think it was never going to come back up.
I probably won't be using it much at all .. I will grab the free games available but I doubt I am going to give them my money again.

I'm glad so I can get the Wizardry game on there with the PSN card I've had for a month. I'll probably wait a bit though and hope they're not as slow once I get on.

I wonder when the "welcome back" package will be available on the PSN-Store.

From their twitter 3 hours ago:

Update on the Welcome Back offer content: it is in the final stages of testing and will be available to download very soon.

Of course with sony, "very soon" could mean "within this month"

My son keeps asking me if Sony operates on "Valve Time".