PS3 lost physical disc-based PS2 backwards compatibility much earlier than 2009.
The models at November 2006 launch in Japan and North America had hardware based emulation, while the models at Europe/Oceania launch in March 2007 had the PS2 Emotion Engine chip removed to lower production costs and was replaced with partial software emulation. The Europe/Oceania launch model then replaced the original model in North American in August 2007. Then in October and November 2007, Sony rolled out an even newer model worldwide that removed the chip that made the partial software emulation possible to reduce costs further and PS2 backwards compatibility was gone.
It only lasted a year unless you had one of those early consoles and no PlayStation model released since has been able to read PS2 discs. Years later they did eventually end up doing a fully software-based emulation for digital sales though.