Year 2010 problem

Year 2010 problem (also 2010 bug ) describes several software errors that occurred in different computer applications at the turn of the year 2009/2010 .

Well-known examples

The most widespread public attention was caused by an error in the programming of various debit and credit cards , which made more than 30 million cards temporarily inoperative. The Dutch company Gemalto has assumed responsibility for this error . In the meantime, the problem has been solved by converting the terminals so that it is not the EMC chip that is read , but the actually outdated magnetic strip . Savings banks and other banks agreed to reimburse the bank customers for the costs incurred due to the failure (for example, foreign transfers for vacationers).

In Australia, the Bank of Queensland's ATMs were disabled by a bug that resulted in a current date in 2016, which caused loyalty cards to be considered "expired".

A bug in the SpamAssassin spam filter resulted in many mails sent after December 31, 2009 being incorrectly classified as spam . Among other things, the mail services GMX and 1 & 1 were affected . The cause was a faulty rule.

Short messages from smartphones with the Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 and 6.5 operating system have given a date in 2016 as the date of dispatch since January 1, 2010.

There was also a problem for users of the ERP software from SAP . The expiry date was incorrectly calculated for spool entries.

A bug in the Endpoint Protection Manager from Symantec , a security software for corporate customers, resulted in virus definition updates dated 2010 being classified as out of date .

The Newton - PDAs from Apple an integer led overflow in the date for calculating data after January 5, 2010 18:48:31 pm means that alarms were repeated in an endless loop.

The Year 2010 issue was unexpected, so it took some time to fix. In contrast to this, the Year 2000 problem (“Millennium Bug”), which was heavily accompanied by the media, largely failed to provide complications or was able to be resolved quickly. The main reason for this is likely to be the catastrophe scenarios predicted in the run-up to the turn of the year 1999/2000, which contributed to the time-consuming preparation of the software manufacturers and users.

causes

In various systems, particularly EC cards, the BCD code is used to store the year , in which the numbers from 0 to 9 are represented with four bits. The (incorrect) interpretation of a two-digit year (X'10 ', binary 0001 0000) stored in this way as a 1-byte binary number leads to confusion between 10 and 16.

In other programs, the date format 200x was expected at certain points, so that dates in 2010 were handled incorrectly.

Web links

The year 2010 causes IT problems. In: heise online. January 5, 2010, accessed January 12, 2010 .
Year 2010 bug also discovered on computers. In: Tom's Hardware. January 8, 2008, accessed January 12, 2010 .
The year 2010 bug. In: You just look ...? January 8, 2008; archived from the original on January 15, 2010 ; Retrieved January 12, 2010 .