As we approach the year 2000, we still remember the Y2K bug caused by the misrepresentation of dates in many software and databases. This problem originated in the 1960s when computer memory was still very expensive. When designing software, developers coded dates with just 2 digits to save memory space.
To resolve the year 2000 bug (also abbreviated as Y2K or also called the millennium bug), some companies have used radical solutions such as decompiling their applications to adopt a better data structure. Other companies have upgraded their application by calling the system date which is not subject to this bug. Other companies, however, performed simple conversions using the windowing technique.
This technique assumes for example that when the last two digits of the date used are greater than or equal to 50, the system translates it the year by 19xx and if it is less than 50, the system translates it by 20xx. This last solution is considered to be the one for lazy people, because it only postpones the deadline for the bug to 2050. Others, on the other hand, have simply shifted the date window from 1900-2000 to 1900-2020.
Splunk, an American multinational, which produces several solutions for finding, analyzing and visualizing large amounts of data, also experienced a bug similar to the Y2K bug after the year 2020. Indeed, to correctly determine the dates and times in Depending on the incoming data, the input processor of the Splunk platform uses a file called “datetime.xml”. The file uses regular expressions to extract many different types of dates and time stamps from the incoming data.
In this file, the code makes it possible to extract data for which the years are coded in two digits until 2019. And therefore until the last day of the year, no problem, the data processing is carried out without problem . But “as of January 1, 2020, these uncorrected instances will mistakenly treat incoming data as having an invalid time stamp year, and could either add time stamps using the current year, or interpret the date incorrectly and add a timestamp with the date misinterpreted. ”
Splunk has provided a fix to resolve this issue that has occurred on its cloud platform. In addition, for Unix-like systems, Splunk also declares that “as of September 13, 2020 at 12 h 26 min 39 s, coordinated universal time (UTC), instances of the uncorrected Splunk platform will not be able to recognize timestamps of events with dates based on Unix time, due to incorrect analysis of timestamp data “.
Splunk is not the only company to have known the bug of the year 2020 (also called bug Y2K20). WWE 2K20 which is a professional wrestling game started to bug when the midnight bell rang on the first day of 2020. As soon as a user selected a mode, the game would crash. 2K Games, the game publisher, provided a patch and asked users to restart the game in order to apply it.
But despite this, some users say they are still experiencing bugs while playing this game. To work around the problem, some have found the workaround by bringing the system date back to December 31, 2019.
A Twitter user by the name of Jim Lippard reported that the Cox company, providing digital cable television services, provided him with an invoice with the date 1920.
Source : splunk
