2010 Date Renders Millions of German Payment Cards Unusable

The year 2010 has caused date representation problems in various pieces of software, crippling critical functionality. Local German media reports that the owners of up to 30 million debit and credit cards issued in the country were unable to use them starting with January 1.

Ten years ago, as the year 2000 was approaching, a computer software bug involving two-digit representations of years in dates threatened to wreak havoc on digital systems. This was dubbed the “Y2K” bug and stemmed from the fact that computers expected an ascending sequence when calculating dates. Therefore, switching from 99 (for 1999) to 00 (for 2000) would have most likely resulted in all sorts of abnormal behavior.

As it seems, 2010 sees yet another date-related issue dubbed "Y2.01K," that was partially introduced when fixing the Y2K bug. Due to the lack of base conversion, some software will treat 10 as a hexadecimal value, instead of a decimal one. In hexadecimal, 10 is 16, thus the date will appear as being 2016.

AFP reports that mostly cards with electronic chips in them have been affected. The German Savings Bank Association (DSGV) said that over 20 million of its electronic cash (EC) cards and 3.5 regular cards had been affected. Other German banking associations such as BDB and BVR also admitted having issues with many of its 6.5 million cards.

Over one third of payment terminals in the country were affected and even if the banks are feverishly working to fix them, the problem is not expected to be completely resolved until next Monday. Meanwhile, many German citizens who tried to use their cards abroad after January 1 also reported similar problems.

Various software manufacturers were also affected. For example, Symantec was left red-faced after its Endpoint Protection client for business customers stopped receiving updates on the first day of the year. "An issue has been identified in the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager (SEPM) server whereby all types of SEP definition content [AV/AS, IPS] with a date greater than December 31, 2009 11:59pm are considered to be 'out of date'," the company announced on Monday.

Users of the popular SpamAssassin anti-spam filtering software, who had version 3.2 installed, were hit by a flurry of false positives. This was triggered by a rule, which assigned a high spam score to any message with a date between 2010 and 2099, for being “grossly in the future.”