The day the Zunes died

The New York Times has a blog by Jenna Wortham about another splendid Microsoft product:

Sure, gadgets sometimes break. But they don’t usually break all at once. That is what happened on Wednesday to a particular model of the Zune, the portable media player that is Microsoft’s answer to the Apple iPod. Reports flooded Zune support Web sites and fan forums describing devices that stopped working early Wednesday morning. Zune owners say the devices are frozen on the startup screen. One posting on the Zune.net forum read: “My Zune has managed to freeze itself with the Zune Logo and the loading bar on the screen and none of the buttons are responding, rebooting isn’t responding, plugging it into the computer isn’t responding, nothing is working.”
On Wednesday evening Microsoft said it had traced the problem to a software bug “related to the way the device handles a leap year.” Apparently the Zune was expecting 2008 to have 365 days, not 366. Only models of the Zune with 30 gigabytes of storage were affected by the glitch. North American sales of all Zune devices surpassed 3 million units in November, but Microsoft would not say how many of those were 30-gigabyte models.
The company said the internal clock on the players should automatically reset by noon Greenwich Mean Time on Thursday (7 a.m. Eastern time). Microsoft is advising Zune owners to allow the player’s battery to fully drain and then turn the devices back on on Thursday. The end-of-year timing led some Zune owners to dub the problem “Z2K9.”
The Zune meltdown is the latest setback in Microsoft’s troubled history with hardware. In 2006, after Microsoft released the Xbox 360, a video gaming console, untold numbers of console owners watched their machines break down because of a severe and widespread manufacturing flaw. During that console crisis, the company offered to fix faulty machines free of charge. Microsoft set aside a reported $1.1 billion for the repairs, a figure that suggested to industry analysts that the problem could affect a third of the 11.6 million 360s already in the hands of consumers.

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