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If you have an older (non-Slim) PlayStation 3, you may want to hold off booting it. Those who have turned theirs on are reporting 8001050F errors, trophy corruption and even single-player offline games that fail to play. Not even disconnecting your Internet cable seems to help. It's suspected to be a date issue; people with the problem report their console dates are reset to 12/31/1999 or 1/1/2000. Perhaps this is the long-awaited Y2K bug finally rearing its ugly head, when we least expect it? Or perhaps the fulfillment of an ancient and previously misunderstood Nostradomus prophecy, signaling the final spiral toward the end of the world? Whatever the cause, what it means is clear: You won't be playing Heavy Rain tonight.
UPDATE: The NeoGAF forum has an interesting theory. It seems this is the first non-leap year that's also an even number since the console launched, so there's likely a calendar issue that causes older PS3s to mistakenly believe this is a leap year and choke (i.e., compute that today should be Feb 29, but then this conflicts with other logic). If true, the issue might correct itself this afternoon or evening when the calendar rolls over (possibly GMT, which makes sense since the issue surfaced Sunday afternoon/evening in the U.S.). Or it may require a console firmware patch, which could explain why Sony has been silent for the past dozen hours…
UPDATE 2: This issue was "resolved" (see Sony's carefully worded "service restored" notice) just after the clock ticked past midnight Greenwich Mean Time. It was late afternoon/early evening in the U.S., about 24 hours since the problem first surfaced. Many news outlets reported that Sony had "fixed" the bug, but we suspect it's more likely that they waited out the clock until their network time servers crossed into March 2. Many console dates remained off (ours was stuck on Feb. 28) but Sony said it was fine to adjust your time and date settings. We expect a mysterious dashboard update in coming weeks may correct the real bug before another aCLOCKalypse (aka Sony ApocalyPS3) can strike.
I for one believe it's the programmers who had to fix all that pre-y2k code for nothing, getting revenge! Or not...
That is quiet the set back for what was suppose to be the most advance Console out at the moment.
Worse PR for PS3 has got in a long time, if it's stuck in an crashed and/or constantly restarting state it could mean the start of a very large recall to fix them; This will cost Sony alot.