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Y2K Bug Raises Its Ugly Head

January 9, 2020

The year 2000 is twenty years in the rear view mirror but apparently there are still some bugs left over that have risen from the dead. To refresh your memory, the problem deals with computer programs that store a two digit year value. The world scrambled at the turn of the century to fix software programs so that they wouldn't interpret January 1, 2000, registered as 01/01/00, as the first day of the year 1900. According to a post by ZDNet, apparently some programmers were lazy in how they corrected the software for the year 2000.

The issue concerns a concept called a pivot year. "Say you are an institution founded in 1920. It is safe to assume that you are not sitting on any information dated from before then; and so, in the double-digit date-recording system, "20" becomes your pivot year. This means that data containing a two-digit year between "00-20" will be treated as post-2000, while years between 20-99 will be interpreted as referring to the previous century."

Parking meter in New York declined credit card payments as a result. A wrestling game produced by 2K crashed a few seconds after the New Year. Apparently, the "2020" problem also impacted the Hamburg subway system. A lot of folks thought that the software used in 2000 would never be in existence twenty years later. For the most part that is true, but some are getting burned by the quick fix taken years ago.

Note that Your IT Consultant will be on sabbatical next week and returns on January 20, 2020.

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