Twenty years ago, some developers dealt with the millennium bug by postponing it until... now.
January 8, 2020 By Daphne Leprince-Ringuet
Twenty years ago, as the world celebrated the start of a new millennium, IT professionals across the globe were getting cold sweats at the prospect of the Y2K bug kicking in: the fear that important systems relying on two-digit date logs would come to a standstill if computers interpreted the 1 January 2000, registered as 01/01/00, as the first day of the year 1900.
No major incident happened, because developers had seen Y2K coming and prepared well. But two decades later, it has become apparent that some resorted to a quicker fix than others, and simply postponed the problem to 2020.
A series of incidents seem to have confirmed that Y2020 is tech's latest unwelcome blast from the past.