Year 2038 Bug — New Doomsday theory

I was start liking computers when theory of Y2K hit us. It created chaos that didn’t last long. Everything stay tuned and work fine. This time another theory hit us with proclaiming greater destruction in real time scenario.

Welcome to the 2038 Bug theory.

The year 2038 problem, we all call it as Unix Millennium Bug,or Y2K38 as our private joke. It expects cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038. The problem affects all software and systems that store system time as a signed 32-bit integer, and interpret this number as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on Thursday, 1 January 1970. The farthest time that can be represented this way is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038. Times beyond this moment will “wrap around” and be stored internally as a negative number, which these systems will interpret as a date in 1901 rather than 2038. This will likely cause problems for users of these systems due to erroneous calculations.

Further, while most programs will only be affected in or very close to 2038, programs that work with future dates will begin to run into problems much sooner. For example, a program that works with dates 20 years in the future will have to be fixed no later than in 2018.

Because most 32-bit Unix-like systems store and manipulate time in this format, it is usually called Unix time, and so the year 2038 problem is often referred to as the Unix Millennium Bug. However, any other non-Unix operating systems and software that store and manipulate time this way will be just as vulnerable.

I find one website very informative about this Y2K38 theory, even if I have taken the image of the bug from this site. Find it here.

I will ask you to google it and I am sure you will find interesting facts round the corner. Lets wait for it.

Find one very good graphical description of Y2K38 problem on Wikipedia. Look at it.