30 GB Zunes failing all over the place

The screams of anguish you might have heard today are the natural reaction of owners of 30 GB Zunes. They started bricking world-wide last night at midnight and nothing can bring them back. No word from Microsoft or anyone else what caused the 30 GB Zunes to all fail at once. Sounds like a massive DRM failure to me.
(via All About Microsoft)
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
There’s a post up at Gizmodo that says you can do a ‘hard’ reset to bring it back. Requires cracking open the case though, assuming it actually works…
Mine committed Zuneicide this morning.
I don’t know that this has anything to do with DRM. I don’t have any DRMed files on my Zune. People are speculating that it may have something to do with the leap year.
Anyway. We shall see. I hope there’s a fix soon, that doesn’t require sending my Zune in for repair.
I can’t see this being related to DRM either. The devices don’t seem to complete their boot / startup, which should have nothing to do with DRM. I’m going with a leap year / date issue in the firmware. Ugh…
I hate DRM as much as the next guy but what has this got to do with it?
I’m also wondering if it’s a leap year thing (in the DRM code or something else). The fact that it was the rollover at midnight (to day 366 of 2008) seems suspect…
This sucks. Z2K9 for the loss.
Now my job really sucks
Oh SNAP!
Mine died too! I haven’t synced mine in a couple weeks so it has to be firmware/hardware related. This really stinks.
David
OK, heres the temporary fix that takes about 5 mins to do but is not for the faint at heart.
1. Remove the small black plastic bezel around your sync cable connector. Use a small screwdriver to carefully pry it up. Its only held in place with friction tabs.
2. Gently pry the top and bottom covers apart, starting at the bottom. There are no locking tabs at the bottom but there are some at the top, so start at the bottom.
3. locate teh two ribbon cables at the top of your zune. one on the left and the other on the right. Lift the gray locking tab carefully on the left cable first to release the cable. Repeat for the cable on the right. Wait a few seconds then carefully reconnect the cables. Small fingers or tweezers help.
4. Reconnect the two halves of your zune starting at the top and gently press it back together. Make sure you lign up the headphone jack with its hole.
5. replace the small screws and snap the black plastic bezel back into place.
5. turn your zune back on and smile!
David
for the brave, David’s instructions get it done. the gal that i gave my zune to has already gotten her’s up and running again doing this.
Be warned though. Just found out that the fix only works until you re-sync with your PC. Mines locked up again. So, since I have to go throughthe process again, I’m going to take some pics of the process and post them over at gottabemobile.com.
David