The error appeared as the date changed from Feb. 28 to March 1. The problem appeared to cause the date on the consoles to reset to Jan. 1, 2000.

"The bug caused the clocks inside the PlayStation 3s to think that the date, February 29, 2010, existed when it didn’t," said Makiko Noda, a spokeswoman at Sony Computer Entertainment, the company’s gaming arm. “The problem was resolved naturally when the date changed to March 1 GMT,” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/technology/02sony.html

Comes during the Toyota "news cycle"