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The millennium bug is back with a vengeance, after programmers in the 1990s simply pushed the problem back by 20 years.
Source: A lazy fix 20 years ago means the Y2K bug is taking down computers now | New Scientist

The New Scientist reports on problems with software caused by an echo of the Y2K bug that had every excited in the late 1990s.

It turns out one of the fixes then was to kick various software cans down the road to 2020. In theory that gave people 20 years to find long term answers to the problems. In some cases they might have expected software refreshes to have solved the issue.

As the New Scientist reports:

Parking meters, cash registers and a professional wrestling video game have fallen foul of a computer glitch related to the Y2K bug.

The Y2020 bug, which has taken many payment and computer systems offline, is a long-lingering side effect of attempts to fix the Y2K, or millennium bug.

Both stem from the way computers store dates. Many older systems express years using two numbers – 98, for instance, for 1998 – in an effort to save memory. The Y2K bug was a fear that computers would treat 00 as 1900, rather than 2000.

It turns out that as many as 80 percent of the quick fixes in the 1990s used a technique called 'windowing'. This meant treating all dates from the 00s to 20s as 2000 to 2020 instead of 1900 to 1920.

In one case people selling cars got acknowledgements from the UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency dated in the early years of last century. That's not going to cause havoc, but you can get an idea of the problem.

There's another problem in the offing. The year 2038 problem.

This happens because Unix time started on January 1 1970. Time since then is stored as a 32-bit integer. On January 19 2038, that integer will overflow.

Most modern applications and operating systems have been patched to fix this although there are some compatibility problems. The real issue comes with embedded hardware, think of things like medical devices, which will need replacing some time in the next 18 years.

To my knowledge no-one in New Zealand has come across similar 2020 problems. Or have they? If you know of any please get in touch.

Y2K bug has a 2020 echo was first posted at billbennett.co.nz.

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