Michael Jackson's sister song from 1989 inexplicably have been breaking laptops for a long time. Why?

Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen told an interesting story on the company's blog about "mystical" computer failures during the Windows XP era.

What happened?

So, a major computer manufacturer discovered that the 1989 song Rhythm Nation, performed by Janet Jackson, contained a frequency that matched the resonance frequency of the laptop's hard drive. As a result, Windows XP laptops failed when playing it. Moreover, there were cases when not only a laptop that was playing the song crashed, but also the devices in the audible range.

Initially, the manufacturer could not understand what was going on and what the "mystique" was. As a result, no one withdrew the drives - the company simply added a special filter, which detected and removed unwanted frequencies during audio playback.

Unfortunately Chen does not specify who is the manufacturer of the laptops and hard drives. He only noted that the failure occurred to some 5400 RPM drives.

By the way, here is that Rhythm Nation song:

Source: Microsoft