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Here's what the Zune homepage looks like at the moment. Can you spot the catastrophic announcement?

It’s being called the Great Zune Suicide of 2008.

Have you heard the news about the Microsoft Zune MP3 players?  If you own one, you already know.  They all decided to lock up shortly after midnight last night!

Naturally, the Y2K type rumors are flying around the tech message boards today as thousands of pissed off Zune owners sound off.

Engadget says the “day of reckoning” begins today.

The Zune website made a subtle announcement on their homepage that they are aware of the issue and working hard to fix it (pictured above and right).  Looks like a lot of programmers won’t be enjoying New Year’s festivities tonight.  Then again, their probably mostly in Japan…so they have a few more hours.

When users of their 30GB models hit the power button this morning, the boot up progress bar would make it all the way over to 100%…and then…nothing.  Frozen.  Just sitting there.

A crashed Zune.

The kicker of it is that most people were not able to get theirs to turn off at that point.  The device was completely locked (shown left).  The only way to shut it off (or take another unsuccessful attempt at booting up) is to wait for the battery to completely drain.  Once dead, it would obviously shut off, and then users could try to boot it up again.

At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be a fix available.  Zune owners are being asked to just sit tight and wait for Microsoft to come up with a solution.