PlayStation Network Woe Plagues Gamers Worldwide, Might Do Actual Harm

Did you try going online with your PS3 yesterday, only to discover that the network was down? And then did you try to playing something that was strictly offline, yet was still told that you couldn’t go forward? What the hell is going on, and why is the problem persisting?

News spread like wildfire last night of a massive PSN outage that primarily targets original (or “phat”) PS3 owners across the globe. Now, when I heard of this, I tried seeing if I was affected, and lo and behold, I had zero issues. Yet downloading anything was slower than usual (for me, PSN always crawls at a snail’s pace), so I simply fired up my 360 instead, which never gives me any network issues (what my machine red ring next time I turn it on).

Earlier today, Sony offered an explanation, of sorts; there’s a bug associated with the clock functionality of everyone’s systems that’s causing these massive headaches. As for why even offline games are being affected, well, anything that deals with trophies, which requires talking with the network, is still technically an online enabled game, despite any lack of multiplayer or not (the PSN game Flower is an excellent example, believe it or not). Furthermore, simply having your system on might lead to trouble:

“We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.”

Wonderful. You mean that even turning it on to watch a movie might cause me to lose save files for games I’m not even touching? Sony’s been guilty of some serious blunders as of late (and then some), but this seriously takes the cake. So let this be a warning to you all. Leave your systems off!

It’s been promised that a fix will be up in 24 hours time, actually less by the time you’re reading this, and all problems might actually be solved, but I’m way too scared to lose my precious MGS4 files. I’ll leave the system off for the next seven days, just to be on the safe side. Besides, just downloaded Mega Man 10 (as previously noted) and should be go to go for a little while.