Hundreds of Microsoft Zunes mysteriously shut down

— -- Is the great Zune Mystery resolved?

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the 30GB version of the popular media player went on the fritz Wednesday morning, and no one seemed to know why.

Many Zune users awoke to find their device permanently frozen.

George Sirois, 32, who works for a nonprofit organization in New York, said he encountered a black screen with the Zune logo, but could not get the device to advance to the menu screen.

When he rebooted, however, the same black screen reappeared and would not go away. After a few hours, the screen and Zune went dead.

"I was obviously distraught," says Sirois, whose Zune contains his music collection, wedding photos and home-made videos.

"I'm just miserable without it," says Katy Bertoldi, a 35-year-old accountant in Baltimore who has stored 3,500 songs and a couple hundred personal photos on her Zune. "It's personal. I'm upset right now."

"If this isn't fixed soon, Microsoft should compensate its customers in some manner," she says.

By late afternoon, Microsoft spokeswoman Katy Asher said the company had isolated the issue to a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year.

The company said the issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to Jan. 1, 2009. The internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset Thursday at 7 a.m. ET.

Owners of 30GB Zunes should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully. Ensure that the device is recharged, then turn it back on, Microsoft said.

Zune Pass subscribers may need to sync the device to a PC to refresh the rights to the subscription content.

The software giant offered customers further updates on the website.

The puzzling problem generated hundreds of complaints on the Zune-related websites and Microsoft's support forum. Some Zune users, citing the timing of the malfunction on New Year's Eve, are calling it the Y2K9 bug.

"What's really surprising is that this came out of nowhere," says Harvey Chute,. author of Zune for Dummies, says none of the other versions of the Zune — the 4, 8, 16, 80 and 120GB models — were affected.