Remember when all you had to do to get a glitchy video game working was pull the cartridge out of the Atari, blow into it, and re-insert? Well, not so much anymore. Millions of PlayStation 3 owners around the world are justifiably irate at the moment because an outage of Sony’s PlayStation Network isn’t just preventing users from playing online; it’s also keeping them from playing offline.

Consumerist reader Jack shares his story:

After a day of skiing, I plopped down to kill some 12 year olds in Bioshock 2’s underwater city Rapture. I found my PS3 had reset itself to the date 12.31.1999, my trophies were erased, and would not play any games. Disabling the Internet allows one to play some non-online titles, but there’s a surprising number of titles that require some kind of Net access to function properly.

As of 21:00 MST, Sony has only acknowledged they’re aware of the problem and looking in to it (this is via their Twitter acct). Interestingly, the entire Sony site is non-functioning as well at this time, which points to a bigger problem than a minor glitch. I’m wondering if they just dropped the ball on planned system maintenance, if they got hacked, or if Skynet has started it’s takeover.

Meanwhile, I have an Xbox 360, so I’m going to have fun staring at my RROD while PS3 users wait anxiously.

PS3s Suffering From Global Network Lockdown [Kotaku]

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