Okay, so the Playstation 3 outage from yesterday wasn’t actually related to Y2K, but it may as well have been.  After all, the big fear of Y2K was that date processing difficulties involving the flop-over from 99 to 00 would permanently disable and/or damage all manner of computer software, most of which involves keeping the date properly.  The thing that disabled the PS3 yesterday?  A calendar error.

For some reason, the old-style Playstation 3 console believed 2010 was a leap year.  So when 2/28 became 3/1, the internal clock of a lot of PS3s said 2/29 which caused those Playstation 3 consoles not to connect to the Playstation Network.  It also disabled the offline game-playing abilities of a lot of other PS3 games.

The glitch was a pretty bad one for Sony, as it hit PS3 units world-wide before mysteriously correcting itself.  Why did it resolve itself?  Nobody really knows, and Sony’s not explaining matters.  They probably reset the secret Sony fail timer on the old units.