Update #2: It appears that turning on your original “fat” PS3 can cause the data to become corrupted and potentially loose trophies or at least it appears you have lost trophies. Sony strongly recommends keeping those PS3s turned off until tomorrow. Still no telling if that stuff is really corrupted or data is really lost yet, will have to wait for tomorrow. Apparently they are preparing a patch that will roll out soon.
Update #1: Thanks to Ted Regulski for sending this in. It looks like Sony has issued an official reply to the issue which is basically “If you have an older ‘fat’ PS3, don’t use it for 24hrs until the date changes”. So it was a date issue after all and we just need to sit on it and rotate until it corrects itself. Nice. Full response from Sony at the end of the post.
If you have a PS3 and tried to use it for the last day or so (for example, to play Heavy Rain) you might have noticed that not only does the game not load, but your PS3 sends itself into a reboot cycle when you try and exit from the software that won’t load.
Originally it was thought that the PlayStation Network was down and that was causing local games to fail from loading. After some more leg-work and comparison of notes in gaming forums (namely NeoGAF) it looked more like a hardware issue than PSN being down.
Details that started to bubble to the surface were:
- New PS3 Slims seem to be unaffected by the problem; they were fine.
- Most original launch PS3s (the fatter ones) seem to be affected, but not all.
As more folks came to the internet looking for a solution and comparing notes with others, a “best guess” at what had gone wrong surfaced in the form of the hardware not being able to handle an even-numbered non-leap-year February/March change over, more specifically by NeoGAF user iammeiam:
The going theory is that the PS3 is storing some form of date in GMT, then modifying that to get whatever you see in the on-screen clock. That modification process seems to be fine–the system can take 2/28/2010, 9PM GMT, add four hours, and get 3/1/2010, 1AM random time zone.
What’s apparently effed, as speculation goes, is when the internal GMT-tracking rolls over to 3/1. It’s either not rolling, or rolling to 2/29, at which point a system tries to add/subtract from 2/29, which it can’t do because the front-end calendar doesn’t have a 2/29/2010, and shit explodes. Seemed to happen around 4PM PDT, which I think is 12AM GMT, so.
And the PS3 launched in 2006; it’s hit 4 2/28s so far. 2007 and 2009 were odd-numbered years; 2008 was an even, and a leap year. 2010 is the first even non-leap-year the system’s been around for. If some sort of base-level math is choking on itself, it may have ruled out the odd 2007 and 2009 successfully, but is convinced the even 2010 is a leap year (this part I’m less sure of, but is why leap year could theoretically come into play at some point.)
At which point NeoGAF user N30RYU put together this funny parody of the “it does everything” PS3 ads from Sony:
On of the telltale behaviors that users are seeing when their machines have this issue (besides being unable to get onto PSN or play some games) is that the system date has been randomly set back to some earlier date like 01/01/2000 – you can check this on your console if you’ve turned it on. Unfortunately correcting the date manually doesn’t seem to fix anything and allow folks to get back online.
It has not been confirmed yet if leaving your PS3 off until tomorrow (3/2/10) will help avoid the issue or if there is a firmware update required, how folks that are currently broken can even get it installed with the state their machines are in. I’m not taking any chances and leaving mine turned off.
For the relatively few PS3 gamers that read online forums and track what is happening, I’ll be curious if the fix persists beyond 3/2/10 and what (if any) workaround there will be and how Sony can roll that out to everyone that needs it.
We’ll keep this story updated as we learn more.
Official Response from Sony
As you may be aware, some customers have been unable to connect to the PlayStation Network today. This problem affects the models other than the new slim PS3.
We believe we have identified that this problem is being caused by a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system.
Errors include:
* The date of the PS3 system may be re-set to Jan 1, 2000.
* When the user tries to sign-in to the PlayStation Network, the following message appears on the screen; “An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F)”.
* When the user tries to launch a game, the following error message appears on the screen and the trophy data may disappear; “Failed to install trophies. Please exit your game.”
* When the user tries to set the time and date of the system via the Internet, the following message appears on the screen; “The current date and time could not be obtained. (8001050F)”
* Users are not able to playback certain rental video downloaded from the PlayStation Store before the expiration date.We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.
As mentioned above, Please be advised that the new slim PS3 is not affected with this error. We are doing our best to resolve the issue and do apologize for any inconvenience caused.
For the latest status on this situation please check either the PlayStation blog (blog.us.playstation.com) or PlayStation.com.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] reader ‘kuroner’ said that he was playing Heavy Rain on the day of the PS3 glitch (“ApacolyPS3″ as Matt Young puts it) and after reloading a scene from a save, main [...]