00 problems 🐛

Happy new year! As midnight loomed on 31 December 1999, the world waited with bated breath. When the clock struck twelve, aircraft didn’t fall out of the sky. Paper notes continued to zip out of cash machines. Power stations kept humming and telephones kept ringing. After years of warnings, the big day was a bit of a nothing burger.

It’s easy to write off the Year 2000 Problem (Y2K) as peak 90s paranoia, the era of X-Files conspiracy and dot-com euphoria. But governments and businesses had spent years, and lots of cash, behind the scenes, fixing the millennium bug.

Back in the day, computers sat in dedicated rooms, and the internet was a destination, an excursion from IRL, rather than the miasmic soup we all now wade through every day. There were no smartphones, and online banking was new. But even then, computers ran banks, factories, hospitals, and governments. Over a quarter of a century later, the world is even more sold on software.

Two fingers

Early computers had little memory and data storage was spenny. Programmers might record years with two digits instead of four. 1968 became (68). This saved space each time a date was stored. Few expected the same programs to be running decades later.

But many were. Computers could read (00) as 1900. This threatened to disrupt everything from payments to birthdates, deliveries to pensions. And there was no single piece of software to replace. Banks had their own decades-old systems. Factories had computer chips buried inside machinery. Hospitals, airlines, utilities, and governments all depended on their own mix of hardware and code. It was a blooming mess.

Bug out

The problem was not spotted at the last minute. Computer scientist Bob Bemer was warning about two-digit years as early as (58). But the issue only entered the mainstream after Canadian programmer Peter de Jager wrote an article called Doomsday 2000 in (93). Governments and businesses began repair programmes in the years that followed. In (97), US auditors were telling federal agencies to get on with it if they hadn’t already started.

The job was huge. The US government looked at thousands of systems and classed more than 6,000 as vital. The final bill was around $8.5bn. Estimates put global spending at between $300bn and $600bn, a windfall for IBM (IBM), Capgemini (CAP), Andersen Consulting, now Accenture (ACN), and armies of contractors. The spending didn't vanish once the clock struck twelve. Firms spent years pulling IT budgets forward to hit the deadline. Once it passed, tech spending fell off a cliff in (00) and (01), just as the dot-com bubble burst.

Britain’s response was run through the Cabinet Office and a government-backed group called Action 2000. Together, they mapped 58 essentials across 25 sectors, from food and welfare to electricity, banking, and weather forecasts. Independent assessments gave each a traffic light rating and published the results, putting pressure on those showing red or amber.

Slow and ready

A date field could be expanded from two digits to four. In some cases, programmers leant on a fix that told a system which century a date belonged to. But windowing sometimes just kicked the can down the road. Some systems that used 20 as their cut-off ran into fresh problems on 1 January that year.

There were failures at the time. The US Naval Observatory website showed the date as 1 January 19100 for about 45 minutes. In Sheffield, a date error skewed the way a computer calculated Down's syndrome risk in pregnancies, giving more than 150 women incorrect results. The code contained another trap. The year (00) was divisible by 400, making it a rare leap year. Some systems failed to account for that. Cash machines and weather computers were among those that glitched on 29 February.

The mobilisation had reduced the harm. That made the warnings look overdone. When prevention works, the lack of disaster makes the effort to avert it look unnecessary. Humans make this mistake all the time. Rules seem pointless when the good times are rolling. It’s known as the preparedness paradox.

Broken windows

You may have seen the xkcd cartoon that shows modern digital infrastructure as a teetering tower of blocks. At the bottom is a small piece holding the whole thing up, a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since (03). Important systems often rest on old code, not to mention projects and people most of us have never heard of. Only when the tower starts to wobble…

The CrowdStrike (CRWD) outage in July (24) showed how dependent modern life is on software. A faulty update caused Windows computers to crash around the world. Microsoft (MSFT) said 8.5mn devices were affected, less than 1% of all Windows machines. CrowdStrike said its software expected 20 pieces of information but the update sent 21. According to insurance firm Parametrix, the top 500 US companies by revenue, excluding Microsoft, had faced $5.4bn (£4.1bn) in financial losses from the outage.

In June (21), edge computing firm Fastly (FSLY) went down after a customer made a change to their settings. That tweak woke up a bug introduced less than a month earlier. Amazon (AMZN), Reddit (RDDT), PayPal (PYPL), and UK government websites were among those affected. Fastly said the bug caused 85% of its network to return errors. It spotted the disruption within a minute and had 95% of the network working again in 49 minutes.

Y2K 2

At 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January (38), some older computers will run out of room in the number they use to record time. Known as the Year 2038 problem, or Y2K38, it stems from systems keeping time by counting the seconds since 1 January (70) using a 32-bit number. Once that number reaches its limit, the clock may jump back to December (01). That’s 1901, not 2001. Sound familiar?

Most modern computers use larger numbers and should be safe. The concern is the knackered equipment still floating around in (38). Factory machines, medical devices, and communications equipment can all remain in service for decades. The bug could also appear when a computer works with future dates, such as the end of a mortgage or insurance policy. Nobody knows how much old code is out there.

Clockstep

GPS has its own problem. Older receivers record time by counting weeks, but the number available to hold that count is too small to rise forever. After 1,024 weeks, just under 20 years, it returns to zero. The most recent rollover happened in April (19), following the first in August (99).

GPS underpins mobile networks, electricity grids, banks, and markets, all of which lean on its precise signals to keep clocks in lockstep. The threat isn’t hypothetical. A (16) software error threw 15 GPS satellites' clocks off by 13 microseconds, disrupting telecoms and knocking out emergency responder radios across North America for hours. Thankfully, newer equipment is designed to handle the rollover, and later GPS signals allow for a much longer count.

Time served

There’s also the Network Time Protocol, which has kept clocks across the internet in sync since the 1980s. Its timestamp has a limit too. It counts seconds in a cycle lasting about 136 years, with the first ending 7 February (36). At that point, the number returns to zero and starts over. Modern versions of NTP are designed to work out which 136-year period a date belongs to. But old or badly written software may not do this properly.

If NTP drifts, the internet stops interneting. Security certificates start looking expired, database updates fall out of order, and systems that depend on strict timing, such as ledgers, logs, and distributed databases, lose track of what happened when.

Midnight hour

Unlike many global threats, Y2K came with a hard deadline. That focused minds. Nobody could push the date back or argue there was still time. Governments and firms worked backwards from midnight and identified what needed doing to ward off disaster.

The Doomsday Clock tries to create the same urgency around threats without a clear end date. It now stands at 85 seconds to midnight. But its midnight is only symbolic. Perils such as climate change, the boogeyman of our time, get worse by degrees. Climate policy has targets and ambitions, but these dates were chosen by people. Those goalposts can and do move. In the 90s, the new millennium was coming whether we were ready or not.