That’s midnight Greenwich time, or 7am Eastern. ZuneInsider just twittered the following updates:

ZuneInsider: ok all. the issue is a bug in the driver that controls the internal clock. turns out it does not like leap years.

ZuneInsider: as the date flips to 09 the device should be back to normal. let the battery die the plug in and restart once we flip the date.

A date driver problem! Sheesh!

I think this means, we have to wait until midnight tonight (Greenwich time) for your Zune 30GB to wake up.

Hope you weren’t planning on playing your Zune 30 at tonight’s New Year’s parties. I’m glad I have my Zune 80GB and 120GB. But, at least, your 30 should rise from the dead in the next few hours, to greet the New Year.

More details on the problem and the fix here. And, Microsoft assures us that it’ll be fixed through a firmware update before the *next* leap year, in 2012.

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Meanwhile, our forums are humming with reports from owners of Zune 30GBs about their players being frozen at the start-up screen.

For you all, here is some reassurance based on my read of the situation:

The problem is almost certainly a firmware issue – not a hardware issue. That’s good news, and it’s not likely that the fix will necessitate you boxing up your player for a hardware fix.

I say that because at least one Zunerama member has reported that a long-neglected 30GB with 2.* firmware is functioning fine.  It seems likely that the source of our freezing is something in the 3.* firmware update.

Also, it seems likely that Microsoft can push out a fix to your player, even if it is not able to start up. There’s a button sequence that will wipe your firmware clean, back to factory-install specifications. When that is done, connecting your player to Zune software will trigger a firmware update. So, from what I know now, I’m expecting that this can be fixed through an automatic firmware update.

Now, can the Zune firmware servers can handle over a million owners of 30GB Zunes trying to get new firmware all at the same time? That is another story, and no doubt a point of concern for the Zune team.