I don't think so, how many times has XBL gone down, tons and you pay for that service, and everybody still loves XBL, PSN is very reliable, this is the first time I can remember it going down for reasons other then when they are maintaining the servers. Shit happens, it sucks but ounce its up and going again everybody will forget and be happy.

At least two other people mentioned 360 RROD...which I didn't, because RROD has nothing to do with this. I used a genuinely legitimate occurence which is both similar in nature and scope. I then refuted your rebuttal by posting 5 times it has been down in the last 3 years, not including even more regular maintenance and traffic issues.

This outage is exactly the same as one or two of those xbl outages. Unable to play games, offline, no online features available. No outcry from the 360 community (maybe some from trolls). This is the same exact thing. There's nothing wrong with comparing 2 things which have so much similarity.

Xbox Live downtime doesn't render your console unable to play the vast majority of the content or indeed DLC. They aren't comparable in the slightest, thats all I'm saying. Fair enough on RROD, the 360 has a shocking failure rate I will never exuse them for that mistake like you and others are doing now.

The Watchdog episode contained some very dodgy unofficial failure numbers but on the whole they highlight the cause of the issue quite nicely for the layman.  It was nowhere near as biased or bs as the disk scratching episode for the 360.

... wow why don't you work for Sony? You know the exact cause for YLOD, maybe you shoudl be on their repair team because YLOD refurbs tend to be recitivists, didn't you know? If they had your information they could put an end to it once and for all!

On a serious note, I'm aware that you probably know what the "direct cause" is. Which I don't. Maybe it's a joint that broke due to excessive heat or something. But you don't know what the indirect cause is. Nobody does. Why does the heat build up in some cases and not in others. Why is it that a team put the release ps3 in a sealed van of 100+ degrees for 24 hours and nothing happened?

I will if you like write a basic explanation which covers both the 360 and PS3 for why it ocurs and why some models are affected and others aren't.  Ever heard of manufacturing tolerances?  I work in a repair centre that fixes all consoles so I see the worst of all of them, including handhelds.

Nah if this is fixed tomorrow or the day after its cool for Sony. The only way this could damage Sony is if the xbox fanboys act all rabid and emo and spam the internet with it just like the PS3 fanboys with RROD.

I will stop when you stop calling this damage control. It's not. I'm just looking at the silver lining. I didn't know that suggesting potentialities was so looked down upon. What really confuses me is that while you condemn my hypothetical situation, you condone another hypothetical situation where Sony said

"as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data."

MAY

why would sales, which you must only mean as new retail sales, be affected when the PS3's at retail aren't affected by the issue?

If people are afraid to turn on their systems, chances are they aren't buying any games.

Yes I have, and am already writing under the assumption of that and other posibilities. The difference, though, is that I'm keeping an open mind about the causes. There is a reason the saying "You never know" exists. Look, I'm not trying to make a serious point about anything. I'm not saying anything with a definitive intent. I simply made an observation that this problem was a pretty stupid one. Really? An error in the calendar system? Even the millennium got through Y2K with no problems. If this is an issue, maybe YLOD is a tiny problem that someone simply glossed over too. *sigh*