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PlayStation Network Down

Sony has released a Questions list that can be found here: http://us.playstation.com/support/answer/index.htm?a_id=2356

  • April 19th – Amazon:

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We’re excited to announce the launch of live HTTP streaming for Amazon CloudFront, AWS’s easy-to-use content delivery network.

Using Amazon CloudFront with Amazon EC2 running Adobe’s Flash Media Server and Amazon Route 53 (AWS’s DNS service), you can now easily and cost-effectively deliver your live video via AWS. And, we’ve made it simple to get started by creating an AWS CloudFormation template that handles all of the provisioning and sequencing for all the AWS resources you need for this live streaming stack.

Portal 2 on Steam, XB360 and PS3, SOCOM 4 Launches.

  • April 20th – GigaOm:

The first graph gives an idea of normal Amazon EC2 response times over the last 30 days, but notice the US-EAST region start to spike at April 20.

The outage that affected a hundreds of applications running in the provider’s US-EAST region is almost resolved, more than 24 hours after a “networking event” took down a number of popular services, including EC2, Elastic Block Storage and Relational Database Service.

We continue to see progress in recovering volumes, and have heard many additional customers confirm that they’re recovering. Our current estimate is that the majority of volumes will be recovered over the next 5 to 6 hours.

First 24 hours of outage (worldwide)

EC2 Outage

Foursquare, Quora, Amazon, Sony, Apple, Reddit, Hootsuite, Wattpad – All went down.

  • April 21st – Sony:

While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running.

  • April 22nd – Sony:

An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services.

  • April 22nd – ZDNet:

Amazon’s Web Services outage: End of cloud innocence?

  • April 24th – 1:42 AM Amazon:

Service disruption: Database instance connectivity and latency issues

In line with the most recent Amazon EC2 update, we wanted to let you know that the team continues to be all-hands on deck working on the remaining database instances in the single affected Availability Zone. It’s taking us longer than we anticipated. When we have an updated ETA or meaningful new update, we will make sure to post it here. But, we can assure you that the team is working this hard and will do so as long as it takes to get this resolved.

At the time, Amazon’s AWS Service Health Dashboard was at red.

  • April 24 – 2:08 PM Amazon:

The number of Database Instances without access continues to reduce steadily. As the access to these remaining database instances is restored, they will become usable without additional action on your end. If your Database Instance is not yet available, you also have the option to initiate a Point-in-time-Restore operation using the steps outlined in our previous post at 10:08 AM PDT. We are in the process of contacting this small set of customers who still do not have access to their Database Instances.

  • April 25 – 8:20AM Sony:

I know you are waiting for additional information on when PlayStation Network and Qriocity services will be online. Unfortunately, I don’t have an update or timeframe to share at this point in time.

As we previously noted, this is a time intensive process and we’re working to get them back online quickly. We’ll keep you updated with information as it becomes available. We once again thank you for your patience.

  • April 25 – 7:39PM Amazon:

We are digging deeply into the root causes of this event and will post a detailed post-mortem.

Amazon and Sony appear to be taking a very similar approach. So was the attack on the PlayStation Network, on Amazon Web Services, or are they one in the same? The answer is: No, they are not.

Others blame Anonymous who had taken credit for a separate hacking attempt earlier in the month towards SCEA. Some believe that this is also partially motivated by Geohot’s impending court rulings. First IANAL, but it would seem there’s a certain level of legality that has been crossed. Clearly he’s not getting hired right now by Sony at the moment because he’s probably being prosecuted by the US DOJ because he’s IN FEDERAL COURT. When a Corporation files a complaint of that caliber, especially one with a DMCA, Copyright Infringement and allegations of Computer Fraud and other crimes, that could be the act of a number of different things including faking the identify of Sony, misuse of the Sony logo or other things that we’ll never hear about. “Geohot” may deserve what’s coming to him just like any one who has walked across a line that fine. He alone will decide what he does with his life at that point.

A recent update from Sony PlayStation Blog stated that PlayStation users are advised to NOT use their PS3’s due to the wide-spread issue with the PlayStation Network. Here’s the direct post that they made:

As you may be aware, some customers have been unable to connect to the PlayStation Network today. This problem affects the models other than the new slim PS3.

We believe we have identified that this problem is being caused by a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system.

Errors include:

  • The date of the PS3 system may be re-set to Jan 1, 2000.
  • When the user tries to sign in to the PlayStation Network, the following
    message appears on the screen; “An error has occurred. You have been
    signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F)”.
  • When the user tries to launch a game, the following error message appears
    on the screen and the trophy data may disappear; “Failed to install
    trophies. Please exit your game.”
  • When the user tries to set the time and date of the system via the
    Internet, the following message appears on the screen; “The current date
    and time could not be obtained. (8001050F)”
  • Users are not able to play back certain rental video downloaded from the
    PlayStation Store before the expiration date.

We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, 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.

As mentioned above, please be advised that the new slim PS3 is not affected with this error. We are doing our best to resolve the issue and do apologize for any inconvenience caused.

As we thought, this is the PS3 Y2K bug indeed. Let’s hope this is resolved before FFXIII comes out.

PlayStation Network Down

As we had reported last night, the Sony PlayStation Network was (and still is) down because of an unexplained technical issue.  The issue causes an error code of 8001050F to appear upon launching any PS3 Blu-Ray Game, setting the clock back to 12/31/1999 (sounds a lot like a Y2K bug), trophy sync problems and downloaded content (DLC) to show that there are invalid copyright permissions.  This has caused a lot of headache among hundreds of thousands of gamers globally and still no update from Sony on their blog or their Twitter feed.

So, what is this? A PS3 Y2K bug? Possibly.  The error code “8001050F” is referenced to mean “Hardware failure. Cannot update firmware or connect to internet.” However, upon launching most games, players are getting a message stating “Registration of the trophy information could not be completed. The game will quit. (8001050F)”. Why would this be? Shouldn’t the PS3 work offline too? That’s what we thought. All of our offline DLC, such as Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII (PS1/PSP Playable) does not work at all. We can’t play single player games that shouldn’t rely on the Internet or not such as Heavy Rain. All we have to say is we hope that this is fixed today, and for sure before the 9th of this month, when Final Fantasy XIII releases.

Usually by this point, Sony would/should have replied…but what’s to be expected from a free network?  Our advice: If you haven’t turned on your PS3 yet, don’t. It’s tragic enough to read about and even worse to see for yourself. Last night, the topic of “playstation network crash” hit the #5 hottest trend on Google and now currently sits at #40. Wait until Sony updates their Blog or Twitter with “we’ve fixed the error”. We will keep you posted as well, so stay tuned.

PlayStation Network Down

We’ve seen our own confirmation of the PlayStation Network crash this evening.  From reports from Mashable, Kotaku and Engadget, it would seem that this is affecting all types of PS3 systems.  A later tweet from the SonyPlayStation stated the following:

PSN status update (part 2): Readers/followers are confirming that “slim” units (120/250 GB models) are connecting normally.

After reading the web, we’ve seen that the problem can accompany the 8001050F error code – turning your PS3 into a brick.  Even the newest games such as Darksiders, Heavy Rain and Bioshock 2 can trigger this problem corrupting saved data, trophies and more.

We’ve also seen that attempting to play DLC games like Final Fantasy VII or VIII that a Copyright/licensing error occurs. WTF. We bought this, it should work!

We hope Sony the best and hope things return to normal soon!