Its safe for you to boot up your PS3 today and resume using it as normal. Sony’s fix for yesterday’s problems were to simply wait until March 2nd 2010, so the PS3 thinks its the March 1st. Sony’s original statement indicated that a patch would be released to resolve the issue, but it seems Sony were simply stalling, “We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours.”
As the issue is still unpatched, it is likely to happen again, though not for another 2-4 years. The PS3 could easily mistake 2012 as not being a leap year causing this whole fiasco again, unless Sony patches the issue in the next firmware update. We know the issue was related to the PS3 thinking 2010 was a leap year, but it took Sony an entire day to admit the same thing:
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. Having the internal clock date change from February 29 to March 1 (both GMT), we have verified that the symptoms are now resolved and that users are able to use their PS3 normally.
If the time displayed on the XMB is still incorrect, users are able to adjust time settings manually or via the internet.
In my opinion, Sony could have handled the entire issue differently by just admitting the issue upfront. Clearly, Sony was aware that the older PS3 models were susceptible to this fault or the PS3 Slim would not have been patched to avoid the issue. Could all this have been a ploy to promote the PS3 Slim?
Gamers aren’t going to forget this anytime soon, and it doesn’t really help when Xbox-ers attribute this to be on the same level as the RROD incident over a year ago. How is this in anyway related to the RROD? The issue was resolved in 24 hours, where as the RROD incident lasted for month and cost Microsoft $1 billion.