The Byrd's Nest

It was a dark night Sunday night – well, for about 5 seconds. That is when a random power outage occurred and interrupted our family movie time. The darkness had just started though, as something wicked was brewing for my Playstation 3.

In my household, we use the Playstation 3 to watch movies. It reads DVDs and Blu-Rays, but an awesome feature is the ability to directly stream movies from Netflix. Since this feature has been added, my family has made good use of it.

We were doing exactly that on Sunday when the power outage hit. In the middle of a family film from Canada, everything went dark. When the power came back on, we took to resetting all the clocks in the house before settling back down to finish our movie.

I fired up the Playstation 3 and was met with the message that an error had occurred and I was signed out of the Playstation Network. I thought perhaps the Internet hadn’t fully come back up, so I reset my modem and router and tried again. I was greeted with the same unfriendly message and an error code.

As I tested the Internet connection, I noticed I had Internet but retained an inability to access the Playstation Network. I hopped online with my error code – 8001050f – and began a search. As I typed in the code, I said a silent prayer that the power outage hadn’t killed my machine.

Alas, it had not. I wasn’t the only person in the world having trouble at that exact moment. Millions of Playstation 3 owners were having problems. More to the point, it was millions of owners of the older, “phat” model PS3. Newer slimlines were not affected.

Sony tweeted that it was aware there was a problem and it was doing what it could to get it fixed. Engineers had been dispatched and Sony customers had nothing to worry about.

In the meantime, my family returned to watching our movie. Fortunately for us, Netflix doesn’t require access to the Playstation Network. We finished our film and went to bed.

Toward the end of the day Monday, I remembered the problem and set about online to find an update. The only update was that Sony promised to have the problem fixed by Tuesday morning. Apparently the firmware on the older models mistook 2010 to be a leap year, which was causing problems with those systems attempting to connect to Sony’s servers.

The company said engineers were continuing to work on the problem, but I knew better. We were waiting for the created day to pass.

Sure enough, twenty-four hours after the problem started, it ended. I turned on the Playstation 3 and was immediately logged into the Playstation Network. The fake day had passed and the older machines were now capable of logging into the servers.

This also reset the clocks on the affected machines back to normal. During the “blackout,” clocks on affected machines reset to Dec. 31, 1999. Unfortunately this also corrupted trophies that had not been synced with the network prior to the trouble.

It was the largest video game console blackout in history. It was Sony’s snafu.

Had this been Microsoft, I would probably be pointing and laughing since this seems like something that would (and has) happened to that company. However, I’m a Sony fan and the blackout may have proved why. You see, if you’re going to do something, go big. Sony did just that, even in its moment of darkness.

Besides, I can’t be mad. My machine works perfectly once again, and just in time for me to pick up the newly-released first-person shooter to which I will be addicted to for the next several weeks. I’m a huge fan of the Battlefield series, and I highly recommend it to any person who enjoys the first-person shooter genre. It’s available on multiple systems and on the PC.