Playstation 3 leap year bug
March 1, 2010 at 9:46 PM by Dr. Drang
As a big fan of Reingold & Dershowitz’s Calendrical Calculations, I’m always on the lookout for calendar-related programming news. This morning I heard (via @jamesthomson) that the Playstation 3 has a leap year bug that screwed up a lot of users yesterday when it became midnight GMT and the calendar flipped from February 28 to March 1.
In addition to my nerdy calendar interest, there was a family angle. My son plays Modern Warfare online with many of his friends. Last night he told me that a few of them were locked out because they couldn’t get online. It seemed weird that 3-4 kids would have network problems simultaneously, but now we know it wasn’t a coincidence.
Unless there’s a leak out of Sony, we may never learn the precise cause of the bug, but it must have acutely embarrassing for an international electronics giant to have to post this:
We are aware that the internal clock functionality in the PS3 units other than the slim model, recognized the year 2010 as a leap year.
Let’s first note that recognized is the wrong verb; you wouldn’t say you saw Ernest Borgnine in a restaurant and recognized him as Brad Pitt. How about mistook? More to the point: can you imagine spending millions of dollars to develop a product that can’t figure out whether a given year is a leap year or not?
My guess is that the firmware takes every even-numbered year to be a leap year. The PS3 came out in late 2006, too late for the bug to have an affect that year. 2008 was, of course, a real leap year, so the faulty code worked. Yesterday was the first time in the PS3’s product life that the bug would cause a problem.
I’m pretty sure that Sony has no real fix. The solution, like Microsoft’s solution for the Zune’s leap year bug back in 2008,
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Yes, that was a self-link. I’m positioning myself as the go-to blogger on leap year bugs. ↩