PlayStation 3 Hit By Errors Making PSN Inaccessible, Crashing Certain Games

UPDATE: "We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours," says Sony.

Many PlayStation 3 owners across the world have found themselves unable to connect to the PlayStation Network online service since Sunday, while their consoles' internal dates have been reset and several games have started outright crashing.

Attempting to connect to the PSN results in failure with an "8001050F" error message, according to Joystiq, meaning all forms of online functionality are wholly unavailable.

Neither Rain, nor wind, nor much of anything else right now.

The new PlayStation Slim is unaffected, according to Sony social media manager Jeff Rubenstein on the PlayStation.Blog, but it seems all other models are vulnerable--including the debug consoles used by developers, which Develop reports "have been thrown into a rebooting cycle, due to an endlessly-looping error message."

Furthermore, Kotaku sends word that certain offline games including Heavy Rain will simply reboot the console when loaded, nor could they play the PSN release Flower.

Rubenstein writes, "know that we have narrowed down the issue and have engineers working to restore service even as you read this," without giving any insight into what is responsible. Eurogamer speculates that a calendar bug is to blame as affected consoles have their date reset to January 1, 2000, even if they haven't been online.

"We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, and genuinely appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this" says Rubenstein. There's no word yet on when normal service will be resumed but Sony says to keep your eyes glued to its Twitter.