Sony has vowed to fix a number of PlayStation 3 consoles which were left rather useless after a recent firmware update, 4.45 ‘bricked’ some consoles.
The update was sent out late on June 18th but pulled soon after due to an increasing number of gamers reporting their consoles not booting up after installing. It was first thought that the update was only affecting those who had upgraded their hard drives, but eventually it transpired that all models and hard drive sizes were affected.
Three days on, no updates from Sony and over 300 pages of angry customers on the PlayStation forums, Sony has finally given an update. Tweeting via its official @PlayStationEU account, Sony this afternoon confirmed that it had identified the problem which affected a ‘small number of PS3 systems’ earlier in the week. Continuing in a second tweet, Sony said that a patch for affected consoles is planned for June 27th to fix the problem.
It seems that the problem caused consoles to be unable to boot properly, resulting in some users left with a blank black screen and others with just the floating ribbon animation. Some users managed to rectify the problem by switching hard drives, whilst others were simply left with a console that can’t be played on.
From a quick look at the 300+ page PlayStation forum post it looks as though Sony will have a number of angry customers on their hands even if they do fix the problem, with some demanding a form of compensation for what will become 9 days of no PS3 once the update does arrive.