Y2K For PS3?
Tyler Anderson
March 04, 2010

On March 1, millions of PS3 owners turned on their PS3 only to find out that their PS3’s weren’t working. Blake Duren, one of these PS3 owners thought that the PS Network had been hacked. “At first I thought that the PS3 network had been hacked because that’s what they were talking about on gaming websites.” So for awhile, many gamers were left wondering when they would be able to play their PS3’s. Sony, the manufacturer of the PS3, made matters worse when their official response was ‘don’t turn on your PS3 console’.
This event wasn’t caused by a hacker however. In fact it was caused by something that millions of people feared on the night of December 31, 1999. According to Zach Johnson, a member of Geek Squad at Best Buy, the bug was actually caused by the PS3’s internal clock. It mistook 2010 as a leap year, so while the world moved on to March 1, the PS3 thought it was still February 29. The PS3 servers basically locked out when the date on their internal clock didn’t match up with reality. Not all PS3’s were affected though. “The PS3 Slim, which was released in September of 2009, was not affected,” according to Johnson. PS3 owners no longer have to worry about this bug because, according to Johnson, the PS3’s internal clock just sort of fixed itself when it turned March 2.
Many people are also wondering about the damage that this bug may have caused to their PS3’s. Johnson says that many people are experiencing different results. Some systems have returned to normal while other gamers are still complaining that there has been permanent damage to their system such as lost data and trophies.
There is also a lot of anger towards Sony and how they should have seen this coming and how their response wasn’t very adequet. It’s questionable however, whether or not this will affect PS3 sales. According to Christa Hall, a person who has considered buying the PS3 in the past, says that she thinks Sony could’ve done more to prevent this. Hoever, when asked if this would affect her decision to buy a PS3 in the future she replied ‘probably not.’ Sony does have a better record than Microsoft when it comes to a quality system. Rates of failure for the Xbox 360 are as high as 25%, or in other words, 1 in 4 people who purchase an Xbox 360 will experience a system failure. Sony however only has a failure rate of 10%, or 1 in 10 people. That’s a pretty big difference. Blake Duren, who has actually experienced the ‘red ring of death’ on his 360 said that he would still choose his PS3 over the Xbox 360 any day.
Although Sony’s response was pretty inadequet, the reponse to Sony’s response may have been over the top. According to Christa, she thinks that all these PS3 owners are just creating a ‘bunch of drama.’ Many are aguring otherwise however, saying that they had to live with the fact that hours, if not days, worth of data and trophies had been erased.