March 1st 2010 would be a day that would go down in gaming history. It would be the day PlayStation Gamers across the World faced the ApocalyPS3. Twitter was awash with tweets about the PSN crashing, Trophies disappearing, and PS3s time traveling back to the late 90s. Official PlayStation forums and Blogs collapsed around the globe. Was this truly the beginning of the End? Had Skynet seized power?

Short answer – no, it turns out that although “It only does Everything” – the mighty PS3 also creates non-existent Leap Years, so on Sunday Feb 28th at the Midnight, the PS3s internal clock ticked over to the paradox-creating Feb 29th, where as the PlayStation Network said it was in March 1st. Arguments ensured and the PS3 ended up going Postal. It only affected the older ‘phat’ PlayStation 3 model, including some developers de-bugs machines, so effectively the World of PlayStation had come to a complete stand still.

Was I angry that I had spent £300 on the most powerful, cutting-edge games machine available and couldn’t use it? Surprisingly no I wasn’t. I actually found the 24hr ApocalyPS3 rather fun,  and from the 1000’s of tweets flying around Twitter and it appears others were too. Some said they would have to get their Atari or ZX Spectrums out of retirement, others pondered the notion of reading a book, some sat gently rocking back and forth in a darkened room. But no-one seemed overly angry, although I’m sure many people were annoyed.

Which is why I love PlayStation and the PlayStation community, in our hour of need we banded together and kept each other informed and amused in equal measures. Sony fixed the issue in record time and we are on the  road to recovery.

And like many of my PlayStation Comrades…..

Fast-forward to 2011………

Little did we know that on Wednesday April 20th the PlayStation Network would cease to be once more. Reports of another attack by Hacker Group – Anonymous quickly emerged. Sony themselves stated an ‘outside intrusion’. Other reports have suggested it was due Sony maintenance that went very, very wrong. Even Skynet have laid claimed to it. Either way, Sony have confirmed they’ve since switched off the PlayStation Network and all it’s related services. Unlike the ApocalyPS3 of 2010 Gamers are very annoyed and extremely angry. So until that mighty stone of maintenance rolls to one side and the PlayStation Network emerges from the darkened cave of it’s rebuilding, all we can do is wait. Or just do something else.

PlayStationer.net will keep you informed of any updates right here and for up to the minute developments follow the EU PlayStation Blog on Twitter