Error 8001050F: PS3 World Bug

Last night I finally found time to try out the latest hit from PS3 – “Heavy Rain”. I figured a good half hour to see the intro and get used to the controls would do before settling down to watch “Into the Storm” a snapshot of Winston Churchill’s life during WWII. The PS3 started playing up immediately and I dismissed the wrong clock signal to having unplugged it at some point this week for some rewiring work. Playstation Network was unavailable and – mysteriously for a newly purchased game – I seemed to require the download of a mega-update of 236MB. It was a mega-update because of the speed of the wifi connection (misery) and not because of the size of the file. The download took over an hour to get to 72% before conveniently displaying an error message that “Download could not be completed”.

Trying to bypass the download and directly playing “Heavy Rain” also resulted in a new error message – apparently the Trophy Room could not be reached. Each error message was accompanied with a mystical number: 8001050F. When I finally decided to google the error message I discovered that the fault was not restricted to Chez Moi but was apparently the result of a global bug that has attacked the “fat” version of PS3- or in consumerist capitalist affluential terms : “older versions”. It turns out that the PS3 network had been afflected by the bug since Feb 28th and no fix was available until last night. It was the first time that I had fallen victim of a global bug (unless I count the influenza virus of course) but it felt weird and helpless. I was amazed at the reactivity of the net.

Global news networks were slow on the take while blogs – particularly specialised ones – had not only reported the bug but had also begun  various discussions such as the utility of having a gamebox that is constantly connected. The online lore has it that previously in the days of MS-DOS everyone with a bit of knowhow could tackle bugs in their own way on their PC. Nowadays the complete experience provided by gaming machines comes with the obligation to depend on those tecchies in Japan if something happens.

Thankfully, the workers at SONY Japan have announced that the bug has been fixed.