the Y2K bug

programmingops culture

The fear that systems storing years as two digits would misread 2000 as 1900 at the century rollover.

Decades of code and data used two-digit years to save space, so '00' was ambiguous, prompting a massive global remediation effort in the late 1990s. The rollover passed with few incidents - which sparked a lasting debate over whether the fix was overkill or precisely why nothing broke.

Also known as: Y2K, millennium bug, year 2000 problem

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