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NTP Glitch Reverts Clocks Back To 2000

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-about-that-time-again dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It seems a glitch of some sort wreaked havoc on some NTP servers yesterday, causing many machines to revert to the year 2000. It seems the Y2K bug that never happened is finally catching up with us in 2012."

1 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The Y2K bug was REAL by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why do people keep pretending that it wasn't? It was a real issue, that required real work to fix. If none of that work had happened, it would've hit and it would've hit hard.

    Lots of organizations worked hard to prepare for Y2K. Lots of other organizations did absolutely nothing to prepare. Neither had any significant problems on 1/1/2000. The reason is there were very few problems to begin with. The myth was that back when memory was precious, programmers stored the year in two bytes instead of four. But those of us that actually programmed in the days when 4K was a LOT of RAM, know that we never used two ASCII chars to store a year. We used a single byte to store the offset from 1900 in binary. So there will be no overflow until 2156.