Microsoft Zune crashes on leap year
5 January 2009
by
Gunthy
Filed under
Hardware
The last day of 2008 seems to be a memorable one for Microsoft Zune owners. It seems that the latest firmware (3.1) had quite a stupid bug which resulted the player to crash or freeze on the 31st of December.
Reason for all this was bad coding which didn’t incorporate a leap year. Since 2008 was of this kind, the software couldn’t handle an extra day after number 365. Numerous blogposts have been appearing on this topic. One of the possible workarounds first suggested was to hard-reset the player, wiping the updated firmware altogether. This however required getting the battery out, which in turn voided the warranty.
Meanwhile Microsoft has acknowledged the problem an posted their own workaround, being to let the Zune power down completely and only to charge/power on again in the afternoon on the 1st of January (GMT time). The fact stays however that this is a major fuck-up on their part. Things like this should have been tested, and one can only wonder how this ever got passed their QC-department. The proposed workaround doesn’t actually solve the issue, and next leap year this will happen again. Let’s hope Microsoft releases better firmware before that time!
