According to a post by Eric Lempel, Director of Playstation Network Operations, at blog.us.playstation.com, the newest PS3 firmware update (2.42) is up and available for download.. or at least so it was meant to be. There have been coming in reports about many PS3 owners having trouble downloading the firmware update while others have not experienced any problems at all.
You might remember that when Trophy support was added to the Playstation 3 with the firmware update 2.40, after downloading it, people reported bricked Playstation 3 systems which forced Sony to remove the 2.40 version from download only hours after releasing it. A few days later firmware update 2.41 was released that did not cause any problems. What is up with the firmware!?