because of the Capcom Deal...I was actually looking forward to going home and playing a lot of games [and a fair amount online]. Dreams temporarily dashed.

What causes great concern is that single player games being effected. Trophies are awesome, but it falls in line with how cool it would be to play a game that didn't have trophies [be it a PS2 game or a PS3 game that had trophies later patched in] then an update could be applied to retro-actively award trophies.

Pipe Dreamin'

Unofficial/anecdotal sources are saying it's a problem with one of the hardware chips having a hardware bug related to either somehow including February 29th, 2010 as a "real" date - it's not, 2010 is NOT a leap year - or a math error in the chip's programming that has the same effect. The date disagreement between the system OS clock and the hardware clock is imagined to be disrupting the trophy support and various other functions.

Many are apparently waiting to see if the problem goes away after 0:00 GMT March 2 2010, tonight at midnight. Others are taking the drastic (and warranty-voiding, assuming their box is still under warranty) of cracking the case and pulling the motherboard battery out to reset the hardware "clock." That's pretty scary, I personally wouldn't try it...

I have a Slim 120GB that is not affected, anecdotes say that the Slims use an updated version of the chip in question that doesn't have the date problem. Hope that's true!

I have the original first run model and it I can't connect to the PlayStationNetwork. The odd thing is that I can run the browser without any problems.

We bought Heavy Rain on Saturday and beat the game and shut down. Later then on Sunday evening the console stopped connecting.

I am pretty annoyed with Sony because they made it hard to initially determine if it was us the end user or them, the network. They could have easily posted a banner or sticky on the playstation forum to let us know so we wouldn't drive ourselves crazy trying to troubleshoot the problem.

Also, they could email us to let us know. But nothing. I already sent out a support request.

Microsoft had the red ring of death that I experienced on 3 consoles. We have three of them so my chances were pretty good to have troubles. Microsoft was crappy about being upfront and honest too.

Right away the leap year theory (it doesn't matter to me whether it is really a leap year, but this is what is being passed arund) was posed on various forums. We will see about that.

But right now. The PS3 is a $699 peice of junk sitting in my living room. Why? Because I just bought MAG and we can't play it. We play Uncharted 2 heavily and we can't play it. That is a big investment to stop working.

Start talking Sony.

I don't have any problems playing or DL games online, but I did have a significant problem trying to play the Demo of Heavy Rain. I DL the game twice and the problem seems to be that the frame rate is terrible to the point that it is very hard to pull off the context moves on the controller. The only way I can explain the problem is like a computer not being able to keep up with the graphical output of the game, therefor it sputters and quakes all the way through the demo... My PS3 is modified form a 40 gig model with a Western Digital notebook 250 gig HDD. I never had this problem with other demo games. I just recently DL GoW3 and it worked fine.

This issue is so bad the company I work for has stoped all dev work/testing on PS3 titles until its fixed. This does not look good Sony. They better get this fixed asap.

Kotaku has a statement from Sony: http://kotaku.com/5482811/

Seems to confirm hardware clock problem supposition. Sony's advice is to not turn your non-Slim PS3 on for 24 hours - i.e., wait to see if the problem resolves itself once the hardware stops thinking it's February 29th, 2010, which is a date that doesn't exist.

Certainly hope that works to resolve the problem, because if it doesn't... hooooo boy.

Jef, thanks for that information. This is what bugs me. I don't find out from Sony, I have to find out on in a comment section in an article as Sony doesn't tell you were to get official updates from.

I am concerned about their "fix:"

"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."

Does this mean that our saved data will be forever lost? We have some serious time invested in these games in order to get to the more interesting game play. Such as leveling in MAG and Uncharted 2.

Video games are about time invested and gameplay provided in return. Failure of the PS3 to preserve this time investment is a serious issue.

It is now coming out that developer debug consoles are also affected by this error, basically shutting down PS3 game development today.

Hopefully waiting the 24 hours is all that is needed, but if it is more severe then that, the PS3 might be in dire straights at the worst time possible.

@Ulakovich: This shouldn't shut down PS3 games development. My studio simply commented out our trophy initialization code and we can do single-player development just fine. Now, a studio that's making a game like MAG, or the Final Fantasy XIV PS3 port, or other MP-only title would likely be crippled... though that may not be the case if they don't rely on PSN technologies.

Also, Sony has updated their official blog: http://blog.us.playstation.com/2010/03/latest-info-on-playstation-network-status
/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PSBlog+%28PlayStati
on.Blog%29

This reminds me of the Zune leap-year bug. Annoying, embarrassing, and once again seems like it's not the big name behind the product that's at fault so much as the little guy who sold the part to the big guy, unless Sony designed and wrote firmware for that buggy hardware clock.

My PS3, which came in the Motorstorm 80GB bundle has been affected by this.
I cannot sign into PSN at all.
I went to look at the date, and it said 01/01/1999.

To test if it still worked, I popped in Red Faction Guerrilla and played
untill I was supposed to get a trophy. I did not get a trophy. ALTHOUGH, I was still able to get
the update for the game and download it properly.

So I manually changed the date to March 1st 2010, removed my ethernet cable, and then popped in Fallout 3 GOTY.
Again I played until I was supposed to get a trophy and did not get a notification. I went to
check my trophy list and found that Fallout 3 was completely missing from my trophy list.
I had about 20% of them before too, it's not like it was a new game that I was playing.

If my trophies are gone I'll be a little bit peeved, but there are a lot of people who take their trophies very seriously.
Why doesn't Sony have big red letters everywhere stating DO NOT USE YOUR SYSTEM.
I checked out their twitter since that was the first recommendation I got from Kotaku, which is the first place I found the article and it said nothing about any damage to your saves and trophies, just that you cannot sign in.

Just how many hard core players, the people who probably bought early due to needing the best of the best and wanting backwards compatibility, are Sony causing to outrage?

Will Sony even bother to release some sort of apology, such as Microsoft did by giving away a free game for a few days because of problems with Live?

What exactly will Sony do if this can't be software patched?

This is going to turn out to be a hack job by some teenager sitting somewhere in his parents house.

IMHO this is just a symptom of bigger problems in Sonys OS strategy. There have been other similar problems before, although not with so disasterous consequences. Part of the problem is Sony's attitude of throwing something out and letting their consumers do the testing which is not acceptable for a console as far as I'm concerned.

I understand in this case it may be a bug with the chip rather than the OS per se, but it still points to Sony engineers not doing enough regression testing on the hardware.