Sony confirms PlayStation Network problems for older PS 3s; says don’t use older PS 3 until bug is fixed

Sony confirmed today that it has had an outage for its PlayStation Network that affects gamers with older PlayStation 3 consoles.

The Japanese company apologized to users and said the network went down over the weekend because of a bug with the system’s clock. It does not affect those who have the newer PS 3 Slim models that launched last August.

The errors in the system include:

• The date of the PS3 system may be reset 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 playback certain rental video downloaded from the PlayStation Store before the expiration date.

Sony says it hopes to resolve the problem within the next 24 hours.  In the meantime, the company advises that you do not use the PS 3, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data. As you can see, this is a pretty colossal bug for the PS 3, with tens of millions of users affected. Sony will provide updates on its blog.