A problem that rears its ugly head twenty years later, because people took some short cuts — that is a norm in modern society, and the Y2020 bug is just a perfect illustration of the “kick the can down the road” philosophy modern world seems to function on these days.

The Y2020 bug, which has taken many payment and computer systems offline, is a long-lingering side effect of attempts to fix the Y2K, or millennium bug.

Both stem from the way computers store dates. Many older systems express years using two numbers – 98, for instance, for 1998 – in an effort to save memory. The Y2K bug was a fear that computers would treat 00 as 1900, rather than 2000.

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.

The New Scientist

Log analytics company that looks for errors in infrastructure, Splunk, was one of the more known companies to be afflicted by the Y2020 bug.