2010 causing problems for phone, banking and e-mail systems
Ten years after we experienced relief as the Y2K bug proved less disastrous than imagined, another date change appears to have caused computer systems some problems worse than a mere New Year’s Day hangover. Card processing, text messaging and spam filtering systems have all experienced what appear to be date-related issues.
Stores in Australia appear to have suffered the most damage after a card processing system provided by the Bank of Queensland mistakenly switched to Jan. 1, 2016 rather than 2010. That left the system reading virtually every customer’s card as having expired and thus refusing to accept payment. That’s particularly poor timing given many people were out shopping in the January sales.
A similar problem, though with less financial damage, has affected a variety of cellphone users. They’ve found that text messages received this year have been dated as received in 2016 rather than 2010. There doesn’t appear to be a clear pattern of which handsets, operating systems or carrier networks are affected.
Neither situation has led to official explanations yet. However, the most common theory is that it is down to the way computer systems often use the hexadecimal system rather than the more common decimal. This has 16 units (0-9 plus A-F) rather than our own 10 and is useful in computing as it is efficient for storing large numbers but is easily compatible with the binary system.
If the affected systems were set to hexadecimal and discounted the first two digits of the year (as they’d be unlikely to be operating in 2100), they will have read ’10′ as sixteen rather than ten.
Meanwhile some users of the Spam Assassin e-mail filtering service have found that all messages sent this year have been mistakenly labeled as spam. It appears the explanation is that several years ago the service’s creators put in an automated rule to mark-up any e-mail which appeared to come from after 2009 as suspicious and hadn’t removed that rule in the meantime.
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