Mountain Lion broke all kinds of records when it was released and is now on millions of Macs. It was only a matter of time, however, before somebody found a problem. Mac OS X is generally pretty solid, but a few little issues seem to always slip through.

One of those little issues reared its ugly head last week as MacBook owners began to find that their batteries were just not holding out like they used to. While it could be blamed on a hardware malfunction, the problem only appears to affect those who have upgraded to Mountain Lion. Unless thousands of people simultaneously ran into battery problems, it’s probably an issue with the operating system itself.

Ars Technica decided to run a few tests to see just how bad the battery life was under Mountain Lion. The test revealed that the new retina display MacBook Pro would lasts a little over eight hours on Lion. With Mountain Lion installed, the battery would never last beyond five hours.

According to a user on the official Apple forums, an Apple rep told him that the problem is indeed originating from the software. The company is currently creating a fix and will distribute it via patch on the App Store once it’s finished.

It’s a relief that it’s only the OS causing the problem. A hardware malfunction on such a massive scale would have embarrassing for Apple. If you find yourself not being able to wait for the release of the patch, you can try a few of these solutions: repair your disk permissions and access control lists, reinstall Dropbox or reset GateKeeper so that it allows apps to install from any source.

Nothing is worse than decreased battery life on laptops. We’ll let you know when the patch is available so that you can get back to eight hour marathons of Mac bliss without having to plug it into the wall.