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New York City Has a Y2K-Like Problem, and It Doesn't Want You To Know About It (nytimes.com)
On April 6, something known as the GPS rollover, a cousin to the dreaded Y2K bug, mostly came and went, as businesses and government agencies around the world heeded warnings and made software or hardware updates in advance. But in New York, something went wrong -- and city officials seem to not want anyone to know. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] New submitter RAYinNYC shares a report: At 7:59 p.m. E.D.T. on Saturday, the New York City Wireless Network, or NYCWiN, went dark, waylaying numerous city tasks and functions, including the collection and transmission of information from some Police Department license plate readers. The shutdown also interrupted the ability of the Department of Transportation to program traffic lights, and prevented agencies such as the sanitation and parks departments from staying connected with far-flung offices and work sites. The culprit was a long-anticipated calendar reset of the centralized Global Positioning System, which connects to devices and computer networks around the world. There has been no public disclosure that NYCWiN, a $500 million network built for the city by Northrop Grumman, was offline and remains so, even as workers are trying to restore it.
City officials tried to play down the shutdown when first asked about it on Monday, speaking of it as if it were a routine maintenance issue. "The city is in the process of upgrading some components of our private wireless network," Stephanie Raphael, a spokeswoman for the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, said in an email on Monday. She referred to the glitch as a "brief software installation period." By Tuesday, the agency acknowledged the network shutdown, but said in an emailed statement that "no critical public safety systems are affected." Ms. Raphael admitted that technicians have been unable to get the network back up and running, adding, "We're working overtime to update the network and bring all of it back online." The problem has raised questions about whether the city had taken appropriate measures to prepare the network for the GPS rollover.
City officials tried to play down the shutdown when first asked about it on Monday, speaking of it as if it were a routine maintenance issue. "The city is in the process of upgrading some components of our private wireless network," Stephanie Raphael, a spokeswoman for the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, said in an email on Monday. She referred to the glitch as a "brief software installation period." By Tuesday, the agency acknowledged the network shutdown, but said in an emailed statement that "no critical public safety systems are affected." Ms. Raphael admitted that technicians have been unable to get the network back up and running, adding, "We're working overtime to update the network and bring all of it back online." The problem has raised questions about whether the city had taken appropriate measures to prepare the network for the GPS rollover.
They didn't have to prepare. The preparation was paying 40 million a year to northrop grumman to maintain and be prepared for them.
A big problem with GPS is so many 3rd party hw vendors made it proprietary-dirt-simple and "upgrading" to a new signal means gutting the existing logic, sometimes entirely. It's not a trivial upgrade whatsoever.
And yet every cheapie android phone out of China managed it just fine. Since the event's timing has been known down to the second since the GPS system came in to existence, most devices didn't even need an update, they left the factory ready for the event. It's not like it's a whole new protocol, it's actually the same protocol just with a counter rolled past zero.