How a Janet Jackson video crashed hard drives of laptops

Back in 2009, Janet Jackson’s music video “Rhythm Nation” was quite a rage and won multiple awards. At the Grammy’s, Jackson won the award for “Best Long Form Music Video”. She followed it up with two MTV music video awards as well and the video often finds a place in those “greatest videos of all-time” lists. But perhaps it also has a rather a shade of notoriety in the tech world.
Microsoft’s principal software engineer Raymond Chen in a blog post has said that the video had the “power to crash laptop computers”. Confused? Chen — without naming the brand — said that a major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops. Not just one brand but a few other competitors’ laptops also crashed when playing the music video.