The Consequences of the Y2K Problem

OK, you now know the meaning of the problem and its history, but what kind of an effect will this problem have? From the technical perspective, there are two things that could happen to a rogue application in the Year 2000.

The first sign that something many be wrong would be when the whole system crashes! In some cases, a computer program will simply not be able handle calculations using the number zero. Without going into too much technical jargon, from a programming point of view, this would be the equivalent of putting square pegs into round holes.

In many ways, a complete meltdown would probably be the better of the two Year 2000 consequences. This is because a system crash is tangible, it's something that you can see and hopefully correct. Given a system failure, a maintenance programmer should be able to identify the problem and go about fixing it.

The second possible consequence of the Year 2000 problem is far more difficult to locate. In this situation, your system will continue to work without falling over. This will give the impression that nothing is wrong. However, while the program is running, the results of date calculations will be completely erroneous.

This second scenario is far more dangerous than the first because errors will creep into the data long before anybody notices that something is wrong. If your system provides data to other systems, or the data calculated by your system is used over and over again, the effects of miscalculated dates could be far reaching. Because there is no tangible crash or system failure, it could be weeks before the errors are picked up, by which time systems, sub-systems and all kinds of external data could also be corrupted.

Let's look at few examples of how ordinary business systems could be affected by incorrectly calculated dates:

Suppose one function of your accounting system is to provide a list of all invoices which have been outstanding longer than a month for the purposes of the dept collection office. Brand new orders may be given an invoice date of 2/2/00. In this case, the accounting system would flag up these brand new invoices because they have been outstanding for over 100 years! This scenario is mild compared to some possibilities.

Suppose a finance company lends money to Mrs Jones, the loan was created on February 2, 1996, and is set to run for a period of 5 years. The finance company's system therefore calculates that the expiry date is February 2, 2001 and sets a flag to stop debiting payments from her account after that date. The following day, the system calculates that the expiry date of 02/02/01 has passed and therefore decides not to take any money from Mrs Jones' account!

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