It seems that the issue that caused a massive number of the PlayStation 3 consoles to suddenly and inexplicably fail for 24 hours on Monday has been determined to have been caused by the same thing that caused a massive 24 hour Zune failure two years back.

It was always a bit of a monolith...

Indeed, the great Zune failure of 2008 lasted a similar period of time and happened on a similar scale, effecting pretty much every 30GB model of Microsoft’s media player in the field. Interestingly enough, and as many had suspected given the similarities between the two apparently unrelated plagues of not-quite-functioning devices, Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry blog points out that there’s one key piece of hardware shared by the pre-PlayStation 3 Slim PS3 models and Microsoft’s Zune – an ARM processor.

Indeed, the most interesting thing about the ARM chip in the PS3 is that it does relatively little, with the much-touted Cell processor handling all of the heavy lifting in terms of processing. Still, the blog post over at Eurogamer paints an interesting picture. Apparently, the PS3’s internal clock is used to sync with the PlayStation Network. Unfortunately, you’re using a clock that’s set to a date that, as it happens, doesn’t exist, things can get very messy indeed.

If nothing else, the fact that this was an issue with the hardware itself goes some way toward explaining why those using their consoles offline (and indeed, those who have never used their PS3 online) were still effected by the issue. It also raises some interesting questions about the situation in Sony.

The fact is that it seems unlikely to have escaped notice entirely within Sony that the same ARM processor as managed to put so many of Microsoft’s Zunes on ice, yet here we are, two years down the road and we have rough estimates saying that millions of PS3s were out of commission…

Still, all that aside, our biggest question (now that it’s over and we don’t need to worry about our PS3s dying anymore) is whether or not the sudden failure of millions of consoles at once was worth it to generate the word “apocalyPS3?” It’s a rich word, we think it might have been worth it.