thumb|Sony's [[chairman of board of directors since 2005 to 2009, Ryōji Chūbachi said, in 2007, that the company was well aware of the existence of this urban legend]]

The , or Sony kill switch, is an urban legend that electronic devices produced by Sony are equipped with a timer which, upon reaching a deliberately preset deadline, causes the product to stop functioning, forcing the user to buy a replacement. The legend began in Japan in the 1980s and was later repeated in other countries.

The legend resurfaced again in 2021 when it was discovered that an anti-cheat measure in PlayStation Network had the potential to render games unplayable on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 video game consoles due to their reliance on maintaining a mandatory accurate date and time setting, whether through connection to the network or a CMOS battery, in a phenomenon known as the C-bomb. Following outcry over the issue, Sony released a firmware update for the PS4 in late September 2021 that resolved the problem for this console, and did the same for the PS5 over a month later.

References

  • Sony timer