Robot Claw

Yesterday, at around 7pm EST, millions of Playstation 3 consoles worldwide just started acting strangely. They wouldn’t connect to the internet, they wouldn’t play games requiring trophies, or games requiring an internet connection, or any games purchased online and downloaded to the system. Certain Blu-Ray films stopped working, the date on the system was screwed up, certain types of data (dynamic themes) were corrupted and trophies had disappeared from trophy lists.

In short: There was something very rotten in the state of Sony PS3.

Very quickly the collective mind of the internet was able to deduce the culprit: the internal clock (hardware, not software) had ticked over to the nonexistent date of February 29, 2010. This in turn confused the software (which correctly realized no such day existed) which sent the entire system haywire. The internet of course exploded with the news, and it was quite astounding to log on to investigate an error code we experienced here in our own living room and read about people as far away as Greece, India and Singapore having the same issue.

Every internal clock in the affected PS3 systems (estimated to be over 25 million worldwide) is set to GMT, so they all failed at once irrelevant of the local time zone.

Sony failed utterly in crisis management. It was over 11 hours before they released any sort of statement about the problem, and until then had only confirmed it via twitter! Their statement confirmed an internal clock issue, but made no explanation of why it took them more than 10 hours to confirm what many had already deduced. They gave no indication of how it would be fixed, but advised owners of affected systems to simply leave it off for 24 hours.

Sony hopes when the internal clock ticks over to March 1 everything will be alright. That will be about 7pm tonight (so in a little under 2 hours). Based on past, similar events this may or may not work. And even if it does a software patch may be required to fix the time anyway (the PS3 will be a day behind the real world). If it doesn’t work it is likely the internal clock will need resetting, and lord knows how Sony plans that. Will they advise users to disconnect their PS3 from the wall for 30 days to let the internal backup battery (that powers the clock) to run dry?

To be honest I have found this event humorous. Sony’s apalling slow and ineffective reaction has not surprised me, and has only confirmed my suspicion that inside Sony HQ they literally had no idea what to do (so let’s do nothing!). The response of the thousands upon thousands of owners that have gone online to discuss this has ranged from bemusement (like me) to vitriol-filled rants about the evil that is Sony. People are screaming for compensation and apologies just because they lose access to their Playstation 3 for a single day.

In fact such is the strength of the response to this event – dubbed ‘apolcalyps3’ – that responses to the response have already started to crop up. They are many and varied, but all poke fun at the more extreme outbursts of anger from PS3 owners.

And in my opinion, there are none better than the response from Adolf Hitler himself:

(Fair warning: NSFW video, contains foul text)

(But watch it, especially you Dad – you’ll love it!)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.