Sony Network Falls Victim to Leap Year Bug

March 2, 2010 - By Justin E. Gehrke

March 2, 2010 – Late yesterday, Sony successfully restored network services supporting its popular PlayStation 3 gaming platform. The widely publicized outage was finally identified as being the fault of a problem in the console’s internal clock. Specifically, the Playstation 3 was identified as erroneously adding the date of February 29, 2010, to the system.

Bringing back fond memories of the infamous Y2K bug from Microsoft, the glitch was unfortunately not identified until it was too late and after affecting millions of gamers worldwide. The problem was only a avoided by owners of the manufacturer’s most recent model, the PS3 Slim. For owners of previous versions, though, the day was wrought with frustration at not being able to connect to Sony’s global network, which is designed to share play, update statistics, and perform other gaming collaboration functions.

On a blog post from Sony late yesterday, users were advised that changing the date manually, to March 1, 2010, would resolve the problem. The announcement cancelled an earlier warning advising PS3 users not to power up their systems for to avoid the possibility of losing their saved gameplay, accrued achievements and statistical data.

Though disaster was successfully averted for many avid gamers, the incident highlights the necessity to implement and verify basic coding, when developing any software applications, especially those that have the potential to cause global problems, when and if they occur. So, if you’re a Sony PS3 owner who missed yesterday’s action, be sure to change the setting immediately upon powering up the device. After all, the world doesn’t need this kind of gaming drama, two days in a row.