With Sony’s typical “We’ll just let them wait and find out approach” on their Blog and Twitter, not to mention the launch of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 tonight at midnight, gamers without a working PS3 are a bit upset to say the least. A global problem with the PS3 Firmware has caused an outage and system failure to systems both online and offline from the PlayStation Network. One thing we have seen this good for is Sony’s PSN Twitter Account, with records of 120-200 new followers per minute. That seems a lot like people standing around waiting for someone to say something – anything – that might help them get out of this snafu that was a major oversight by Sony’s Q/A Department. With those already doing the “corporate shuffle” and blaming MSI and Freescale as commentators on the PSN Blog should be ashamed of themselves.
At approximately 9PM CST on February 28th, 2010, users began dropping off of the PSN. They found themselves locked out of their systems, including those who had not connected and only updated via PS3 games as a mandatory firmware update, with their system clocks rolled back to December 31st, 1999. Those who had connected to the Internet and updated also found themselves in more trouble than that. Sony confirms that save data, game data and DLC and DRM Content may become corrupt if you even turn on your PS3. That’s right: Sony has advised people to not even turn on their PS3. According to CNN, Sony reported last month a total of 40 million gamers who had connected to the PSN but were not sure how many of those were plagued with this problem.
We have read around the web that players trophies have disappeared altogether – however this may not be the case. After we logged into http://us.playstation.com/, we found that only what we had done within the last two weeks, (last trophy reported was February 15th, 2010) was not present with a convenient fine print of…
Note: The above information is dependent on the proper functioning of the PlayStation®Network. Information is not updated in real time.
That means all of our Heavy Rain and White Knight Chronicles trophies are gone…or maybe not. We don’t know yet because of their fine print. However, we can confirm that users who did hear about this problem last night and unplugged their systems from the Internet were still affected since it was the firmware that caused the problem – not the connectivity to the Internet. One user reported to us that they had never connected their PS3 to the Internet and just played Fallout 3 and their system still worked just fine.
No word from Sony yet. Some users have reported removing the system battery will correct this problem, however this will most likely void your warranty. We’ll update this post further when our staff has a chance to add few more comments.
In the mean time, tell us what you think Sony should do to fix this problem. Just push a firmware update (which we’re hearing might not even work), give us free credit to the PlayStation Store (or perhaps remove the DRM so this doesn’t happen again and we can play Single Player Games) or start shipping out PS3 Slims to everyone. We look forward to your thoughts and comments!