It seems that Sony’s PlayStation 3 has been hit by a ten-years-too-late Y2K style calendar bug, which has just ticked over for many users, causing all kinds of issues for both consoles and services.

Sony's PlayStation 3 Slim is, thankfully, uneffected

The issue has effected a fairly wide proportion of the PlayStation 3’s userbase, though for the moment it seems that anyone using the PlayStation 3 Slim, released last October, shouldn’t encounter the bug. For those of you using a “fat” PlayStation 3, the news is strange, and not good at all. Indeed, it could well be the case that games are entirely unplayable.

According to the folks over at PlayStation LifeStyle, anyone who encounters the issue will likely find that their console’s clock has rolled back to the 31st of December, in that case, you’ll find that the time has been thrown off too, though reports vary on just what extent things have been mucked up to. Reports indicate that all of this is due to the PS3’s effected not being able to access Sony’s PlayStation Network; if users then attempt to run a PlayStation 3 or PSN-purchased game they’ll find themselves presented with a message that simply reads,

“Registration of the trophy information could not be completed.
The game will quit.
(8001050)”

Sony has responded to the issue through the medium of the official PlayStation Twitter account, which you can find at @SonyPlayStation. The official response from the Sony folks simply reads,

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

That was the message eight hours ago, and so far things haven’t improved except for a tweet to say, fairly simply, that work to fix the issue is ongoing and that users of the PS3 Slim shouldn’t be affected by the outage. Still, with no word on when we can expect to see it fixed, we can imagine there are plenty of angry PS3 owners out there…