The Curious Case of Mass Zune Fail
by Agen Schmitz
on December 31, 2008
Remember back in the waning days of 1999, as the globe held its breath in anticipation of massive computerized infrastructure failure thanks to the Y2K bug. Happily, our civilization survived. But today a new bug unexpectedly reared its head and crashed seemingly every model of the original (now discontinued) 30 GB Microsoft Zune digital audio player. Call it the Zune2K8 bug. Ars Technica reports that Zunes began restarting and locking up at their boot screens around midnight Pacific time last night, and that it seems to be tied to the Zune 3.x firmware. Matthew Miller over at ZDNet's Mobile Gadgeteer blog has heard from a reader that it might be related to this year being a leap year. If you really, really need to get your OG Zune working again for rocking the social tonight, Gizmodo has posted a DIY fix that requires a bit of noodling with the hard drive. But Microsoft is on the case and I'm sure a new firmware release will be out in the next few days.
--Agen G.N. Schmitz
Ed Sanders on December 31, 2008 at 03:25 PM
Why am I receiving these stupid posts "to me"?
Nothing in them interests me in the slightest.
Fstopper on December 31, 2008 at 04:52 PM
Zune 30gb Don't throw it away yet!! (I think)
http://forums.zune.net/412486/ShowPost.aspx
Here is the Zune website forum post for the solution to the mass Zune failure/lockup. It should self correct at 12:01 PM 01/01/2009
coffee fiend on January 01, 2009 at 10:41 AM
this is rough. first the X-box meltdown and now the Zune. but is this really all that surprising?
Pat Berry on January 01, 2009 at 02:52 PM
"But today a new bug unexpectedly reared its head and crashed seemingly every model of the original (now discontinued) 30 GB Microsoft Zune digital audio player."
This sentence makes no sense. There aren't multiple models of the 30GB Zune. The Zune 30 IS a model.
The phrase "new bug" also is inaccurate. The bug has been in the Zune 30 firmware since the device was released, but it was only triggered by the last day of a leap year. So nobody knew about it until yesterday.
And the picture, while amusing, shows Kirk holding one of the later model Zunes, which did not have the bug.