Sony: PS3 leap year glitch caused network lockout
Clock up
Old-style PlayStation 3 consoles are now able to reconnect to the PlayStation Network, after a glitch in the machine's internal clock blocked access to the online service.
Sony last night confirmed early claims that the clock was to blame. The bug caused the console to treat 2010 as a leap year and so change the date at midnight GMT Sunday to 29 February rather than 1 March.
The new, slimline PS3s were not affected.
Clearly, the PSN log-on process involves some degree of time synchronisation, and all those consoles around the world sending in the wrong date were told they would not be allowed to connect.
Once the consoles' clocks changed to 1 March, they were allowed to connect to PSN once more.
Users can set the date to the correct one, if they haven't already, in the PS3's settings.
Sony apologised for any inconvenience the glitch may have caused, but has yet to say whether a firmware patch that will fix the problem is on the way. ®
COMMENTS
WE'RE ALL DOOOOOOOMED!
The news people made this sound like the end of the world, rather than a date glitch which was easily fixed. still, good job i didnt use my phat ps3 yesterday. All is fine today.
phew. Banana skin avoided!
apocalyPS3 averted
Loving Sony's PR spin today, being reported by BBC etc., that they have fixed the problem.
Although they don't appear to have explained their "fix" consisted of them crossing their fingers, closing their eyes, repeating "Please! Please! Please!" all day, and waiting for 1-Mar-10 to pass into history.
Ta-da ... fixed!
@Raspy32
No, the RealtimeClock was trying to set the OS Clock to Feb 29th, which the frontend clock refused to do, because it knew that was a bogus date.
Some PS3's (most of the 80GB units, and all the slims), the RTC was setting the correct date.
In a way, the PS3 firmware was TOO smart, it knew the date the RTC was trying to set was bogus and refused to have it. The fix is either to code a workaround in the PS3 firmware so the next time the realtime clock tries to set a bogus date, rather than refusing to accept it, it does something more sensible like patch the date temporarily until the Realtime clock starts trying to set a valid date again.
"Once the consoles' clocks changed to 1 March" ????
You need to do more research before making assumptions! Why not talk to actual PS3 users, there's enough of us on here :-)
My PS3 failed on Monday (actually, both of my PS3s failed) and the bug caused the clock to roll back to just before midnight on 31/12/1999, not 29/02/2010 as you reported. I then manually reset the clock to 01/03/2010 but could not log in to PSN. The next day, Tuesday, I could log into PSN, but the clock now showed a date in 04/2010 before I corrected it, NOT 01/03/2010 as you report. So the problem is probably a leap year miscalculation, but not as you describe it.
So.....
Assuming that one of the chips had a misunderstanding of date and thought that 01/03/10 was actually 29/02/10 then won't it still be a day behind?
Of course, it'll work now as it's back to assuming that the date is a day which actually exists, but today for example it may think is the 2nd March (when at time of posting it is the 3rd).
It may just be me not understanding how it works but logically it would seem that it still sits a day behind the rest of the system.
