A lazy fix 20 years ago means the Y2K bug is taking down computers now - The Y2020 bug, which has taken many payment and computer systems offlin

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Programmers wanting to avoid the Y2K bug had two broad options: entirely rewrite their code, or adopt a quick fix called “windowing”, which would treat all dates from 00 to 20, as from the 2000s, rather than the 1900s. An estimated 80 per cent of computers fixed in 1999 used the quicker, cheaper option.

“Windowing, even during Y2K, was the worst of all possible solutions because it kicked the problem down the road,” says Dylan Mulvin at the London School of Economics.
Read more: Binary babel: Fixing computing’s coding bugs

Coders chose 1920 to 2020 as the standard window because of the significance of the midpoint, 1970. “Many programming languages and systems handle dates and times as seconds from 1970/01/01, also called Unix time,” says Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, an engineer at cloud platform provider Fastly.

Unix is a widely used operating system in a variety of industries, and this “epoch time” is seen as a standard.

The theory was that these windowed systems would be outmoded by the time 2020 arrived, but many are still hanging on and in some cases the issue had been forgotten.

“Fixing bugs in old legacy systems is a nightmare: it’s spaghetti and nobody who wrote it is still around,” says Paul Lomax, who handled the Y2K bug for Vodafone. “Clearly they assumed their systems would be long out of use by 2020. Much as those in the 60s didn’t think their code would still be around in the year 2000.”

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