Tech & Biz

Microsoft's 30gb Zune MP3 Player Issue Fixed

by Rob Walker | January 1, 2009 at 12:07 pm

409 views | 0 Recommendations | 3 comments

Microsoft has come out with an official fix for the 30gb Zune mp3 player that caused thousands of the devices to shut down yesterday. Their advice? "Wait it out."

The bug was caused by the fact that some programmer working with a semiconductor company forgot it was a leap year. As such, their internal clock driver sort of forgot how to work properly. Leaving your Zune unplugged and letting the battery die should sort it out.

You can check out our previous Zune story here.

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. The issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to January 1, 2009.

A little more on the problem can be found here:

In other words, the Zune didn't know how to handle the fact that 2008 had 366 days, instead of the usual 365, so it froze up. The fiasco quickly became known as "Z2K" or "Z2K9," after the feared Y2K bug that never materialized in 2000.

The flaw that made Zunes freeze has been tracked down, it seems, to a piece of bad programming emanating from Freescale (the semiconductor company spun off from Motorola).
Simply put, there was a loop to allow for leap years (as 2008 was). However, it didn't have any way to get past the beginning of the 366th day of the year.

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Steve Kass

at 14:01 on January 1st, 2009

Year 2008, day 366: Zune 30GBs across the world froze like this.

Steve Kass has contributed a photo to this story.

psycomitch (not verified)

at 14:43 on January 2nd, 2009

I'm still extremely pleased with my Zune, as I hope everyone else is. This is the first genuine error my zune has come across as long as i've had it (2 years). My roommate has gone through 3 or 4 ipods in the time I have had my zune, and i constantly rub it in her face =).