BEATING THE BUG

There was no human sacrifice. Dogs and cats did not live together. The only mass hysteria was in the media. And unlike Ghostbusters, the Millennium Bug, also known as the Y2K problem, was very real. It was only through a lot of hard work on the part of programmers and IT contractors across the world that bad things didn’t happen. And it’s not as if we weren’t warned about it years in advance.

For those under the age of 40, here’s the condensed version: as the year 2000 approached, warnings increased in the press that, at one second past midnight on January 1, all computers would experience an integer overflow; planes would fall out of the sky, and nuclear reactors explode as a result of catastrophic computer failures linked to the date rollover. This didn’t happen, as most computers had been “fixed”—some properly, and others in a way that merely postponed the problem. There were effects, some detrimental and others just annoying, from a date-related integer overflow in 2000, just as there were effects from such bugs before that year. In fact, we continue to feel the effects today. Here’s how Y2K unfolded…

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

First, Oppa Gangnam Style! The Korean pop hit that taste forgot thrust its way manfully through the eardrums of the world and racked up 2,147,483,647 views on YouTube in 2014. This particular figure was the largest number of views YouTube’s backend could support back then, as the site was written with 32-bit integers in mind. A quick upgrade to 64-bit integers later, and Psy’s terrifying total could continue its unstoppable upsurge toward the new ceiling of over 9 quintillion views. The basic problem here, an integer overflow, is essentially the same as the Y2K problem.

It all boils down to programmers taking a shortcut, and representing a year with two digits instead of four. This happens absolutely everywhere, despite International Standard ISO 8601 specifying