Maybe not rendered completely useless but the PS3's primary audience wants to play games on it, not watch movies so to many, it was rendered useless

Rendered useless?

Hardly!

Okay so maybe it wouldn't do it's main job (play games) but it still played DVDs and streamed content from PS3 Media Server so I was a happy enough bunny.

All I noticed was a message saying that a 'Network Error' occurred. Until I read the articles on the net about it, I thought it was down to a connection problem from one of my PCs to the PS3.

Rob

it all comes back to nvidia. PS3 should have gone with ati it's all nvidia's fault shame on them. And this new web layout sucks ass on this site.

That wasn't the problem. The problem was a conflict between the hardware and software. For whatever reason, the hardware chip believed the Date should be February 29th, the OS, which likely had a separate calendar database, could not convert the "binary" date of Feb 29 to appear in the OS since it believed one does not exist and outputted a default date (Jan 1 2000, or something like that). Therefore, all "user saved data" became haywire because of this issue. This affected users who never access PSN or "checked in" online.

It's somewhat typical of Sony to try to shift the blame. Keep in mind that ARM doesn't make processors, they just sell IP to companies who do. In the end, it's that company's fault.

Anyway, the network being down for one day, effectively rendering thousands, if not millions of consoles useless for that time is a major issue regardless: the whole concept of having a device that must report to a central server is a bad idea in the first place, and this was a nice demonstration.

For the record, this poster does not own any games console.

But it's not a leap year....

It was 1 day that the network was down, and it seemed like it was the Xbox fanboys that were crying, trying to make the issue bigger than it actually was.