Sony Accidentally Erases List of Anniversary PS4 Winners

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/sony-accidentally-erases-list-of-anniversary-ps4-w/1100-6425579/

Sony in Japan has accidentally erased the list of all 123 winners of its PlayStation 4 Anniversary Edition contest, meaning it will need to restart the competition.

The corporation has offered its "deepest apologies," after determining that all data of the winning contestants is irretrievable.

Sony is pretty good at keeping information these days.

What the actual fuck?

That's seriously mega shitty.

No backups whatsoever? No means of data retrieval through specialized companies (I guess they are to cheap for that)? What happened to printing or using a fucking pen and paper?

They should probably get in touch with the NSA, the ubiquitous backup system.

That is just....strange

I laughed.

Then I felt bad because some people are going to be super disappointed.

Then I laughed again.

How the fuck does a multinational company lose a list? A motherfucking list? Shouldn't that have been in, like, five different databases, backed up on twice as many servers?

As a side note... wonder if I can get one this time?

I

what

I just imagine that the list was kept in a Notepad document on an old, dirty Sony Vaio and the dude in charge of it spilt his coffee on it then shows up to the meeting all like "Guys...uhhh...I fucked up."

@bigjeffrey: Hahahaha that's great.

@bigjeffrey: That's awesome!

"It was HACKERS! Definitely hackers! It was the lizard men!"

This is an almost impressive level of incompetence. You'd really have hoped everyone at this tech supercorp would have learned to back up their data.

@bigjeffrey: hahaha

Incompetence?

@believer258 said:

That too.

Somebody clicked the wrong button on the Pastebin...

That's one big "whoops"

Governments leave / lose briefcases with personal information in them all the time. Its not uncommon.

No wonder they were hacked last year. Their computers are made of lint and frog guts.

@bigjeffrey: Amazing.

So, based on the article, I get the impression the only actual consequence of this is that it's going to take longer. It doesn't sound like the announced they winners, and even if they did, it was something based on unique codes that came with systems (and apparently also attached to the serial number of each system?), so theoretically the same people will still be winners. Right? Maybe I'm misunderstanding this.

Mine is still unopened in the cupboard, don't even know what number it is.

Does anyone remember at E3 when Sony said they would stop fucking things up?

That is something else.

Well, let's see here. Was I on the list? Nope.

Can I be in the new list? If I win, I sure can.

So, yeah, I see now problems here. In fact EXCELLENT JOB Sony that was a really good idea! You earn top marks in my book.

You can't make this shit up. Surreal.

I honestly assumed this was satire.

haha :)

#rebuildingthelist

Truly an impressive level of incompetence, sucks for the phantom winners.

How can their not be any other record of the list? I assume there would have been copies of the list on different servers or sent out by email to different branches or departments. Something along those lines at the very least . I'm just amazed at that level of incompetence/stupidity by a company that large. Like was there just one individual who was the "Keeper of the List" and ninjas stormed his office and planted thermite on his computer that had the only copy.

This is confusing. So they had a list that was generated somehow. Maybe a randomized pull from an entrant list? Then they lost the results table. Someone deleted it, or a routine server process deleted the table. Did they ever notify any of the winners? If not, it seems like more of a philosophy question than anything... If the list is gone but no one was ever notified, did anyone ever win at all? Why have they announced the disappearance of a list, instead of just running the query again and pulling a new data set? If everyone still has their equal shot at the prize, how has anyone lost anything? Other than Sony seemingly losing more of their dignity?

Hold on, why would they announce this?

Who would know?

Good old Sony, it makes you wonder what else they don't have backed up. Oh well at least they didn't lose the prizes themselves, though I wouldn't put it passed them.

It says everybody needs to resend in codes. So presumably they deleted everything.

I can't even tell you the "dropped-birthday-cake-at-my-own-party" level of disappointment I'd be feeling if I was a contestant winner right now. That's a next-level fuck up, right there.

I just think it's cute he opening post almost makes it look like "Sony" is a person. What probobly happened was an overworked PR rep making $45K accidentally deleted it or had some IT issue.