Interwebz | The Interwebz Blog | In it for t3h lulz!

Remember all the hysteria about the Y2K Bug? Well, something like that just happened to PlayStation 3.

I was on my PS3 last night, and saw people going crazy on forums about this error.. and at the time nobody really knew what it was.. I thought it was weird that it was around 12GMT on a leap year but thought no thats not right sony wouldnt cock up that much… how wrong I was!

basically, there are 2 clock in a PS3… a system clock and an OS clock. The system clock never stops and only ever counts upwards, it cant go down. The fault lies in this as it thinks this year is a leap year and therefore changed the time to 00:00 Feb 29th (this clock never stops and isnt connected to the internet so even if your PS3 was unplugged from mains and internet its still fucked) so when users turn the PS3 on.. the system clock trys to update the OS clock… and it just goes WTF!?!? this aint right so changes the date back to 1999 for some, 2000 for others and even some as far back as 1600

So far there is only one fix and it hasnt been mentioned by Sony.. that is to take the PS3 apart and disconnect the battery from the system clock (yes there is a battery in there, its kinda like a watch battery) as this resets the system clock and is the only way (i know of) doing it. Its also only the “phatt” models that are affected, so the slims are fine!

Its going to be interesting to see what Sony do to fix this as it is a hardware fault not a software fault that im pretty sure cant be updated with abit of software… unless they release a new firmware that disregards the system clocks time/date and only uses the time difference between switching the PS3 off and then on again and then adding it to the system clock.. but who knows

They will release a statement/fix on the problem tomorrow so dont expect anything today as i recon they are waiting for the system clock to tick over again tonight… and see what it turns out at as it could fix itself!