PS3 outage a leap year bug?

Late yesterday, reports started appearing across the social networks and message boards of PS3 owners losing trophy information and the console being unable to play game discs. At first it was suspected that this was due to an outage of the Playstation Network (PSN). Most users reported getting the 8001050F error code, and even booting up without a network connection doesn’t alleviate the problem.

As more info has leaked out, it appears the problem is limited to the older ‘phat’ PS3 models, as PS3 Slim users haven’t noticed the same problem. It’s widely suspected to be a firmware problem, possibly due to a leap year bug, much like the one that caused the Zune error last year.

It’s probably just a coincidence that the Playstation page was hacked  to redirect to a page that read “get flash and/or enable javascript and stop wasting my time”, though that error has now been corrected.  Sony has posted a number of updates to their twitter account…

We’re aware that many of you are having problems connecting to PSN, and yes, we’re looking into it. Stay tuned for updates.

PSN status update: We’re narrowing down the issue and continue to work to restore service to all. Updates as soon as we have them.

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

It’s highly unlikely that any data is permanently lost, and once a patch is announced everything should return to normal.  In the meantime, if you’re the owner of an older PS3 model, you might want to keep your finger off the power button until Sony announces a fix for this, which will probably first be announced via their twitter.