Work needed to avert Y2K disaster in 2038

To claim the Y2K glitch was a hoax is false. Widespread disaster was averted and the lessons are pertinent today, finds Thom Gibbs

Technology experts have said they are fearing a repeat of the “Millennium bug” crisis in two decades’ time. Devices are at risk of crashing on Jan 19 2038 when the systems behind them lose the ability to track time internally, they say. The Y2K bug saw huge numbers of developers update systems to ensure they could cope with dates beyond 1999, averting a meltdown. The Daily Telegraph takes a look back at that work and finds that the lessons are pertinent today.

AS INVESTORS brace for what is likely to be another turbulent year on the markets, technology experts are looking further ahead – and fretting over a repeat of the “Millennium bug” crisis in two decades’ time.

Devices across the world are at risk of crashing on Jan 19 2038 when the systems behind them lose the ability to track time internally. It is feared this could cause massive disruption as essential services fail. The risk stems from the 32-bit processors, which older operating systems have used to count seconds since Jan 1 1970. These will hit the threshold for the number of seconds they can keep track of in January 2038, meaning that unless they are updated to newer 64-bit systems, they will revert to 1901 and could malfunction.

Rodolfo Rosini, of artificial intelligence firm Zeroth.ai, said the problem is more pressing than the Millennium bug – also known as Y2K – which saw huge numbers of developers working to update systems to ensure they could cope with dates beyond 1999. Ultimately a meltdown was averted due to that work, which Mr Rosini was involved in. But this time, he said the effort required is even more enormous due to the rise of the internet. Mr Rosini said: “A lot of systems with the Y2K bug continued working because there was no network. Today, everything is networked, and will start issuing errors.” This means everything needs to be updated to prevent contagion spreading.

Modern PCS and phones themselves are unlikely to be affected as the vast majority of them already run on more powerful 64-bit operating systems.

Arnd Bergmann, who helps maintain the core of the Linux operating system and works with groups such as Cambridge-based tech business Linaro, said the risk instead comes from less sophisticated devices, which hum away in the background. He said: “The problem is all those tiny embedded processors running the rest of the world, all the network infrastructure. Things like the oven, the smart light-bulb, the billions of things connected to the internet. Most of those are 32-bit, and most are running Linux. They are affected.”

Up until now, 32-bit processors may have appeared more attractive because they are cheaper. But these will need to be updated to the 64-bit systems – which should continue to count correctly for billions of years. Mr Bergmann said developers have already started.

Most regular people do not have to worry about their machines, or do anything to their devices, Mr Bergmann said, but there are some organisations that “have to worry about this a lot” – for example companies that “build trains or power stations or any industrial machine that has a very long service life, which will be operating at customer sites for the next 30 or 40 years”. He said: “The majority of the machines that people are working on now may still be 32-bit depending on the application.”

This means companies urgently need to ensure machines coming off their suppliers’ production lines are crisisproof now. Or they could be forced to swap out hardware or update software later – a lengthy and expensive process.

Mr Rosini said: “At the very least, there should be something put in place which says by 2022, every single new system has to be fully compliant.”

On the night before the Millennium, Prof Martyn Thomas turned on his taps and filled every bathtub in his house with cold water. Like thousands of others on Dec 31 1999, he was preparing to celebrate the new year with a caveat.

“I had been very worried,” he says. “To the point where I’d stocked up with food. One thing I didn’t want, given that I was a Y2K expert, was feeling bloody stupid if the water system failed and we didn’t have any water.”

It is stocking up on food and filling up baths that now seem silly, because the Millennium bug has become a joke. An industrial-strength panic over nothing, a grossly hyped non-event, a byword for over reaction. But was it really a myth?

In the late Nineties the threat of the bug generated clear panic. There were leaflets, billboards, newspaper pullouts and a dramatic advert warning about the risks. “The Millennium bug,” it promised, “will affect every business in the UK.”

The issue was easy enough to understand. In the early days of computing, memory costs were extortionate. Every byte needed to be accounted for, so using as little data as possible was the aim for programmers. When storing dates within their programs, coders realised they could halve the amount of memory space required by only using two digits. One result of this was that four-digit years were converted into two by getting rid of the “19” part of the data.

This was not a problem in the Sixties and Seventies, when the idea of a year beginning with “20” belonged to science fiction. The issue comes from computers making assumptions about the missing digits, especially when different answers are plausible.

The image of planes simultaneously falling to earth at the stroke of midnight on Jan 1 2000 became one of the most hardy doomsday scenarios in the thousands of stories about Y2K. Other well-worn scares were mortgage holders suddenly accruing 100 years of extra interest in the new year, a run on bottled water and nuclear missiles being fired automatically.

In general, the most alarming claims were sensationalist, often growing from pundits’ predictions as worst-case scenarios to likely outcomes in the process of reporting.

Less glamorous areas still held the ability to cause serious issues. There were particular concerns about making the electricity grid fully compliant.

In response, the new Labour government set up Action

2000 with the aim of ensuring “no material disruption” to the British economy as a result of the Millennium bug.

Tony Blair was also not shy in stressing the urgency of the problem.

He went so far as to appoint a minister for the Millennium bug,

Paddy Tipping. “My kids thought it was enormously funny,” he says. “My IT skills at that time were pretty rudimentary. I did say to Tony: ‘Why have you asked me to do that?’.

And he said: ‘Because you know so little you’ll ask the obvious questions.’”

In Britain, then, there was no shortage of urgency to fix the problem. But how to do it?

The first job was to assess potentially troublesome code and find two-digit dates. These needed fixing, in some cases by adding an extra 19 or 20. Another solution known as “windowing” instructed computers to treat any two digit date below a certain value (30, for example) as taking a 20, and those over 30 being years from the 20th century. This was seen as an unsatisfying fix, as it replicated the initial mistake, assuming code would no longer be in use in 30 years. Then came rigorous testing, which inevitably found new mistakes. Changing any line of code has infinite complications, because of the thousands of other lines of code it does business with. Then came another iteration of fixes that would eliminate those errors. Then more testing, more iterating, further testing, until finally programmers could state with confidence their machines would function in 2000.

It was not thrilling work. Emma Byrne was part of a team that reached 70 members at its peak who fixed the bug for Thomas Cook: “It was a bunker mentality … unglamorous, repetitive.”

As 1999 drew on the messaging from the government was becoming calmer. By late December there was a briefing from Downing Street and the Home Office suggesting police and troops would be on standby to “deal with any outbreak of disorder on Millennium night”, although the Ministry of Defence denied this briefing on New Year’s Eve in an attempt to reduce public concern. Despite the messages, the bug was beginning to bite. There were problems in Bedfordshire social services, where an attempt to find 100-year-olds in social care was fruitless. Making computers Y2K compatible had prevented them from recognising the year of birth required, 1900. The 17-year-old space shuttle Discovery was brought back to Earth early because of fears that the bug would affect the ageing computers on board.

Andrea Scancarella, an Italian worried the bug would erase his bank account, was similarly cautious. He withdrew 11m lire (then about £3,700), everything he had, shortly before New Year’s Eve. Minutes later, while stopping to look in a shop window, two men on a scooter stole his bag containing all of it.

“Everyone was prepared for things to go completely wrong,” says Paddy Tipping. “There was a Cabinet subcommittee scheduled for Jan 1 at some godforsaken time, I think it was 6 o’clock. But there was nothing to do. I spent the evening at the Cabinet Office. It was the worst New Year’s Eve I have ever had.”

The real test would be what happened next. The clock struck midnight then … nothing happened.

That is the conventional narrative, with examples like the 150 malfunctioning slot machines at a Delaware racetrack given to illustrate the small fry impact of Y2K. Some dates went wrong on some websites, some bus ticket machines didn’t work in Australia, someone returning the film The General’s Daughter in New York state was billed $91,250, because the computer thought he had rented it for 100 years. So, little to worry about in the grand scheme of things. But “nothing”?

There are no previously unrevealed tales of Armageddon to relay here, but some people did feel the impact of the bug. Nine hundred families living in apartments in Pyongchon, South Korea, were left shivering after their heating went out. Dialysis machines stopped working in a hospital in Egypt. Most concerning is the story of 150 pregnant women being given incorrect results in a test for Down’s syndrome in Sheffield. An error attributed to the Millennium bug meant the women were told they were at low-risk, which meant four Down’s syndrome pregnancies went undetected.

The Apocalypse may have failed to materialise, but to claim the Millennium bug was some deceptive hoax is disingenuous.

Ultimately, widespread disaster was averted. Was the price paid too high? We will never know. The bug wasn’t as bad as it was made to seem. Some people stood to profit and it was in their interests to talk up risk. Others were worried, worked hard, and were altruistic. All of these things can be true. The seeds of our current position of extremes, leave or remain, Boris or Jeremy, lots of plane flights or none at all, seem to have been sown here. As we approach 2020 many of us are either for or against an issue, seeking definition and a sense of identity from that position, and there is little room for uncertainty, doubt, the muddled reality of life.

Simplifying something as knotty as the world’s response to a legacy coding issue helps no one. We owe a complex issue like Y2K more than to use it as a cheap comparison for over-exaggeration.