Zunes Attempt to Shun 2009

Some people spend the last day of the year differently than others. Some might prepare their resolutions, while others treat it like any other day. If you are a Zune user, you might very-well not be listening to your music today. Although the reason for the mass suicide isn’t verified by Microsoft, some feel that it has to do with this year being a leap year, and in some small way, that makes sense.

Or does it? The reports at that some Zunes are simply dying off at around 2:00AM today, which if EST time, would be midnight PST. The good thing is that all of the Zunes should begin working tomorrow (we can hope), but I am pretty interested in the real reason this is happening. If a Zune can die off simply because of a date issue, that doesn’t give me much reason to believe in the stability of the product.

If it is indeed a date issue, Microsoft will likely issue a firmware update for the device, but that might not matter to many people. By the time the next leap year rolls around, we’ll likely be toting around 3TB Zunes (don’t quote me, my assumptions have been known to be absurd).

Update: Whoops, it seems my math was a little (lot) off. 2:00AM EST would be 11:00PM PST, not midnight. Thanks to Johnny for the correction.

According to reports this isn’t a few 30GB Zune’s that have failed, the vast majority of the devices have the same exact failure symptoms and have been reports by hundreds of owners according to Gizmodo. At this point little is known as to what is causing the mass failures of the devices. Once Microsoft is up and running for the workday, perhaps we will get more information on the issue.