Alive!
Earlier today, reports came in that many PS3s were not able to connect to the PSN. Starting off as a query for some people as to why they could not connect, soon many others began updating their various Social Networking sites with exclamations that they could not only not connect to PSN, they were not able to start up some recent games with trophies and their dates had somehow gone back to New Year’s Eve, 1999.
This, however, was no cause for celebration, with it later emerging that only original PS3 systems, not Slims or 80GBs were affected. The reason for this was confirmed by the official Playstation Blog to be an error within the PS3′s clock functionality, presumably due to the clock assuming it was a leap year, and no date of 29/02/10 being found on the older models.
The Editor of OPM has confirmed through his twitter feed that as of 23:50 tonight, his PS3 is up and running with a normal date, with many other sources confirming this. We should be able to sign back in to PSN, play our trophy games and relax. This is obviously good news, but shows that a little error in a system can cause havoc, with major news sites reporting on this as if it were the end of Playstation itself.
With that over, let’s all sit back and remember the day that was February 29th 2010. Or was it?
Phew. Ultimately an annoyance and it could have been much worse. Think of poor Xbox owners like myself who have had an E74 and E73 error.
But I loved some of the glorious puns I have seen online today. ApocalyPS3 Now? Awesome. Enjoy your consoles, guys.
APOCALYP3 was definately my favourite…
Great console, my slim was fine for the whole night. What happened here then?
Something technical. Apparently the internal clock did not recognise a specific date. That caused validation errors for games taht required trophy support or had multiplayer components. The way I understand it, because it was an internal clock issue, it was simply a case of waiting until the following day and the issue corrected itself.
Some people at Sony were clearly on bended knee, praying to the patron saints of geeks, gamers and fanboys. Their prayers were heard.
They made it look like waiting for the next day – but it was fixed before 12, so it can’t have been?
I ain’t a programmer. God knows what tricks these guys have up their sleeves.
It starting fixing itself when the date changed in Greenwich England. That’s where they keep the master clock for everybody (GMT) and that is what the PS3 internal clock uses. So if you live in the eastern time zone which is -5 hrs GMT, it would have fixed itself around 7pm. For those on the west coast at -8 hrs GMT, it would have been 4pm.