Leap year confounds computers
February’s extra day threw a spanner in the works at petrol pumps around the country yesterday, with some pay-atpump systems unable to process transactions.
Pumps at Gull, Waitomo and NPD stations were affected by the glitch, which a Gull spokesperson said was caused by the leap day.
But how, in 2024, can the addition of a single extra day still cripple a computer system?
Human error – yes, that old chestnut. Because although it’s computers doing the crashing, it’s their programming which triggers the problem.
If February’s extra day isn’t factored in during coding, malfunctions in time and date calculations can strike when the 29th rolls around.
Unfortunately, yesterday’s petrol pump problems weren’t the first and are unlikely to be the last to strike on a leap year.
At midnight on December 31, 1996, the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter ground to a halt after the computer system failed to recognise the extra day in the year.
A smelter in Tasmania was similarly affected and the repair bill across the two sites ran to more than $1 million.
In 2012, Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform was out of action for 12 hours because it couldn’t authenticate a certificate dated February 29.
Sony also ran into problems after misidentifying 2010 as a leap year. The mistake caused havoc with the PlayStation 3’s internal clock, leading to connectivity issues and error messages.
And a leap year bug in the luggage system at Dusseldorf Airport in 2016 caused more than 1200 pieces of luggage to miss their flights on February 29.