It's the weekend. You've had that new copy of Heavy Rain sitting on your desk all week, and it's finally time to dig in. But then when you try to start it up...you get an error message that prevents the game from starting up. Those cries of frustration you hear are being echoed by gamers all around the world today in light of what appears to be a PlayStation Network crash.

Within the last hour, Twitter and various online forums (including our own) have erupted with reports of an "8001050F" error preventing PS3 users from logging into the PlayStation Network. While that's frustrating enough for anyone who's trying to play a multiplayer game, even more disconcerting is news that this PSN outage is also preventing some gamers from starting up single-player games such as Heavy Rain.

When trying to start Heavy Rain, many gamers (myself included) are getting an error that says, "Registration of the trophy information could not be completed." Even worse, previously-gained trophies from the game do not seem to be visible on the account anymore once this error has been received. Some gamers are not having this problem, so it's unclear right now what exactly causes it or in which games.

According to some forum posts, Sony tech support has confirmed the issue as "unscheduled maintenance," though we were unable to get in touch with anyone at Sony to confirm at this time. We'll update this post if we hear from them and can confirm the problem.

Obviously, though, if PSN problems prevent even single-player games from being played, that's a cause for serious concern. Here's hoping Sony cleans up these problems quickly and has some idea of how to prevent them in the future.

UPDATE: Sony has confirmed via their SonyPlayStation Twitter account that they're looking into the PSN issues: "We're aware that many of you are having problems connecting to PSN, and yes, we're looking into it. Stay tuned for updates."

UPDATE 2: Forum users on NeoGAF and elsewhere have noticed that in addition to the PSN problems, many of the affected PS3s seem to have inexplicably had their PS3 system clocks reset to December 31, 1999. This has led to further speculation that the problem some users are experiencing could be a system issue unrelated to the PlayStation Network. Could the PS3 have been taken down by some sort of Y2K-esque clock bug?

The same GAF thread has speculation that only older "fat" PlayStation 3s are being affected by this issue, while new PS3 Slim models should still be able to connect to PSN. All of this info is just based off of reports from the forum for the time being; Sony has yet to release any official statement on what's going on.