This made me laugh. First I heard of it, my son rang me and said the PS3 wasn’t working. I thought fair enough, I’ll take a look at it when I get home – it’s still under warranty anyway so not really concerned. Half an hour later one of my mates calls and says his PS3 isn’t working – so now my spider senses are tingling.
Turns out the PS3 (the old fat one, not the new slim) had a “Millenium Bug” style fault. It thought/thinks that 2010 is a leap year, so the consoles date & time for 1st March 2010 actually set to 29th Febuary 2010. So far so boring, but that caused a major problem. Once the PS3 was switched on and went online it did what it apparently always does and checkes it’s own clock against the clock on the PlayStation Network. Now since 29th Febuary 2010 doesn’t actually exist, the PS3 throws a panic and sets it’s date back a few years. The result of that…the connection to the Playstation Network fails. And some games will not operate as the DRM checks go potty when they realise you’re trying to play a game that hasn’t even been written yet. Presumably Sony don’t want you playing games from the future eh?
The official Sony blog were awash wish outraged gamers who couldn’t use their PS3′s, but Sony did say the problem “should” correct itself once the PS3′s internal clock had rolled over to 1st March 2010 (ie a date that exists). It did for me – just past midnight the PS3 started up perfectly and connected to the PSN, and there didn’t appear to be any damage (like lost game saves).
I couldn’t believe how angry some people were about this. Sure. it’s not exactly something you would expect, but sometimes these kinds of things do happen. I’m certainly not angry about it – the PS3 is such an awesome piece of hardware. If you think the grass is greener on the other side, just see how many results you get for “Broken XBox” on a Google search – their hardware is nowhere near as robust.
The other thing I thought was great was how Google responded to this. Just by Googling “Playstation Network” the top result was a news entry letting me know what had happened. I was watching TV and neither SKY nor the BBC seemed to be reporting it, but were doing the usual reporting about the same news items they’d been talking about all day long.
