Thousands of Zune players, Microsoft's rival to the Apple iPod, shut down over the new year, leaving many owners waking up on January 1 unable to listen to their cherished music.

While many people loudly celebrated the passing of the year, disgruntled Zune users flooded online forums complaining that they had been left tuneless as their music players had frozen.

The glitch, which potentially affected millions of the devices globally and thousands in the UK, initially left Microsoft engineers baffled as they scrambled to fix the problem.

The company has now said that it has solved the issue. Microsoft’s solution was simple and easily understood by anyone who has suffered problems with their computer. Wait a day for the Zune player to run out of battery and turn off — then switch it back on again.

“It worked for me and it seems like it’s working for customers," said a spokesman. “From the limited time I’ve looked on the forums, it seems customers have had good success with it."

But while many Zune player’s started to come back to life on Friday, some owners still reported problems with their gadget.

Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company, explained that the problem stemmed from “a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way a device handles a leap year".

This meant that the Zune could not handle the fact that 2008 had 366 days, instead of the usual 365, so the gadgets broke down. On January 1, the machine’s software automatically checks its internal clock again and would have got past the missing day.

As the meltdown happened over the new year, it has been called “Z2K” after the “Y2K” fears that computers would fail simultaneously at the dawn of the millennium.

The glitch only affected 30-gigabyte Zune players, which were the first models to be released in mid-November 2006.

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