"The Linux admins who experienced the crashes started a thread to that effect on the slashdot.org community site. In response, developer Linas Vepstas pulled together a summary of the issue on the Kernel mailing list lkml.org.
"According to Vepstas, the 53 reported hard crashes at or near midnight December 31 2008 had a few things in common. In all cases the systems were not pingable and power-off cold reboots were required to get them back to normal working conditions. There were no syslog error messages, no kernel oopses and no core dumps."