Sony Computer Entertainment unveiled a special twentieth anniversary edition of the PlayStation 4 console back in December, and the gray plastic video game system generated a lot of demand due to its limited quantity. Sony held a contest where it chose 123 lucky PlayStation fans to win one of the ultra rare consoles, but somehow the Japanese electronics company accidentally deleted the list of the winners.

“Our deepest apologies for the trouble we have caused to those who entered the previous campaign,” Sony wrote on its website (translation from Kotaku).

The contestants did not only lose out on a snazzy rare system. Because the anniversary edition of the PlayStation 4 is so rare – only 12,300 were made – the game consoles are worth a significant amount of money to the right buyers. One of the console systems sold on Ebay for $20,000, and Sony itself auctioned another (with the proceeds going to charity) for about $129,000. That’s enough to buy around 200 regular PS4s with a little money left over to paint them all gray.

Oops?

How could a multi-billion dollar technology company lose an electronic list of names? Where are the backups? Have they not heard of cloud storage? Truthfully, Sony does not have the best reputation for data security after multiple data breaches and network outages over the last few years. Mistakenly deleting a list of contest winners is not quite as costly as previous data problems, such as the notorious email leak from the company’s film studio, Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Sony has yet to confirm exactly what resulted in the loss of the list of winners, but it will now be holding another campaign to find another group to be awarded with the consoles. People who entered into the previous contest and use the code they received from the first one or go through the slightly more tedious process of sending in their hardware information and serial number.

With mistakes like this and the occasional huge data breaches and denial of service attacks, Sony might want to keep a copy of this one in a safety deposit box somewhere.

Screenshot via PlayStation/YouTube