New year nightmare for Zune owners

 

Gallery

By Stuart Turton

Posted on 2 Jan 2009 at 08:28

A leap-year bug in Zune's software left thousands of people unable to boot their device over the new year.

The flaw appears to be limited to first-generation 30GB models, all of which stopped working as midnight struck, according to reports on the Zune forums.

"I had my Zune charging and all a sudden I hear it start whirring as I'm sitting here at the laptop," notes one poster. "I looked up just in time to see it restarting itself at exactly 12:00 midnight, watched the loading bar, and then, the freeze. Great. What is going on?"

"My Zune 30GB has done the exact same thing," notes another customer. "I was watching a movie, all of a sudden the stupid thing shuts off and goes to the Zune screen with a full loading bar at the bottom. I've tried every button combination I can think of, but it's not responding to anything! Help, I don't need anymore paperweights!"

Microsoft says it is aware of the problem, and users simply need to wait it out.

"We were alerted by our customers that there was a widespread issue affecting our 2006 model Zune 30GB devices," the company says. "The technical team jumped on the problem immediately and isolated the issue: a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year."

"We expect the internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset tomorrow (noon, GMT). By tomorrow, you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on. If you're a Zune Pass subscriber, you may need to sync your device with your PC to refresh the rights to the subscription content you have downloaded to your device."