The Day Zune Music Died...

Hoping to start the New Year with a playlist full of songs carefully selected to bring your revelry to a fevered pitch? Turns out that plan might go silent if you're the owner of a 30GB Microsoft Zune. Reports around the Web are surfacing that the Zune first began freezing in the Midwest yesterday. Today, the Great Zune Crash of '08 has spread across the country.
Currently, Microsoft has not issued a statement on why their Zune music player is crashing. Nor has the company issued a fix to correct the problem.

Most of the Web has jumped on the timing of the Zune's collapse, pointing back to 1999 when the world was caught in the grips of the Y2K phenomenon. But this time, instead of computer systems crashing, banks failing and the world falling into disrepair, it's just the Zune that has started to mysteriously fail.

Z2K, anyone? Y2K9, perhaps?

The Day Zune Music Died?

Zune users who own the 30GB version of the player are reporting failures and lockups on a couple of sites. To see the complaints, check out Zune.net>, ZuneUser and ZuneScene.

The problem seems to be that when users reboot their Zune's the status bar will reach 100 percent and then freeze. That could mean that as midnight and 2009 approaches many Microsoft customers will be left without their digital music to ring in the New Year.

All I can say is: Good thing it wasn't the iPod. If Apple had planned something like this, chances are good we'd all be bowing to our new Jobs-ian overlord. As it is, it's Microsoft: there were bound to be a few glitches in the first release.

My 8 GB Zune is still working --- for now...