Sony responds to pulling of 2.4 firmware update

Earlier this week there was a little bit of positive news surrounding a number of new features the Playstation 3 was receiving through a firmware update. Sadly, this positive press for Sony didn’t last long and the update was quickly pulled following widespread reports of many users having their consoles bricked by installing the firmware.

Patrick Seybold, Sony’s Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media has responded on the Playstation Blog:

“As has been reported on many gaming blogs and websites, we have temporarily taken Firmware v2.40 offline. We’ve received a limited number of calls from consumers experiencing an issue with installing the system software update on their PS3. While our consumer services department has seen a low volume of calls on this topic, we are committed to providing the PS3 community with XMB access features delivered in the v2.40 update. We are working diligently to isolate the problem for those few consumers and to identify a solution before we put the firmware back up.”

Further comments from users whose consoles have been affected by the update seems to suggest that the most widely noted problem is systems simply failing to reach the XMB upon booting, instead getting stuck on a screen with only the familiar “wave” background displayed.

Some gamers have posted that have reported that removing the PS3 hard disk, formatting it via a PC, then re-inserting it allows the PS3 to boot properly. This solution has the slight drawback of erasing everything that was contained on the hard drive, such as profiles, game saves and DLC…

It also appears that your PS3 will be fine if it successfully installed the update, the issues have only been experienced by people during, or directly after installation.