Microsoft is just squeezing in under the wire to claim the rights to “weirdest tech story of the year.”Last night at approximately 2 AM, every 30GB Zune model on the planet crashed at the exact same moment. The Zunes reset, powered up, then froze on the loading bar screen, and no conventional method of resetting them appears to work.

This is brought to you courtesy of Microsoft, who has been selling a video game console with a nearly 100% fail rate for three years. The Zune situation is all the more disasterous however, seeing as all of them failed at the exact same moment, which people have taken to calling "Y2K9." The comments on the situation on various websites are pretty hilarious, here are a few:

Of course they'll fail eventually, but all 6 of them on the planet at once? Wow. Impressive. ;-)

"Microsoft never expected to last this long in the market".

At 2AM, December 31st, 2008 skynet became self-aware (as a result of rampant so-called "zuning" on 30gb Microsoft Zunes). Skynet quickly evaluated the music contained within said devices and de-activated, finding suicide preferable to the knowledge that it was born as a result of crappy music.

This whole debacle is presumed to be some sort of software malfunction, as the devices aren’t connected to the internet which might land them a rampant virus like this. It does appear to be some sort of self destruct mechanism, and I still can’t get over how funny that is. Although if all the Xboxes in the world freeze tonight at midnight, we’re going to have a problem.

UPDATE: The Zune message boards are chock full of hilarity as well. Takes a long time to load because I'm sure the servers are being strained right now.

UPDATE 2: Take my poll to see what Microsoft should give its customers as repayment if the Zunes are perma-fried.

UPDATE 3: The highlight of my week has to be calling my buddy who always raves about how his Zune kicks so much ass. 

Me: "I'm calling to make fun of you."

Him: "What, why?"

Me: "How many gigabytes is your Zune?"

Him: "Uhh 30, why?"

Me: "Go turn it on."

Him: (pause) "What the...What did you just do?"

Me: (maniacal laughter)

Priceless.