To keep my attention-deficit-disordered brain occupied, I have TwitScoop open on the wonderful window onto the Twitter-sphere Tweetdeck, and suddenly I saw in huge type 30GB and Zune. Reports were pouring into Zune fora that first gen 30GB were failing en masse. They began failing at midnight last night, and users are dubbing it Z2K9. Despite it happening around the New Year, Gizmodo throws cold water on the idea that it might be a date-based error.

The proximity of the events to the New Year, which inspired the Y2K9 moniker, provides little more than a colorful backdrop; it's unlikely that the switching of years in the Zune's internal calendar has anything to do with the failures (besides, it hasn't even happened yet).

It might be a firmware upgrade gone bad, but it's too early to tell. Neowin has the details of the problem from a poster on a Microsoft Zune support forum:



"At exactly 2am CDT (12am PDT), the docked Zune made the "unplugged from USB port" bong-noise and went to the boot-up screen with the 100% loading bar...and froze. At 2:30am CDT, I decided to check the other Zune. Turned it on and...frozen at the 100% loading screen."

For more Zune puns than you can probably tolerate, head over to Reddit. A bit of a sampler:



Jones77: I wonder when normal service will rezune?

Mosquito Wipes: Probably not anytime zune.

nihilisticmonk: I wonder what the reazune for the crashing is?

For the Blair Witch edition of Zune failure, check out this video. Does this look familiar to any Zuner owners out there?