Future Bugs

In computer science, time formatting and storage bugs are a class of software bugs which may cause time and date calculation or display to be improperly handled. These are most commonly manifestations of arithmetic overflow, but can also be the result of other issues. The most well-known consequence of bugs of this type is the Y2K problem, but many other milestone dates or times exist that have caused or will cause problems depending on various programming deficiencies.

YEAR 2028
During the late 1970s, on Data General Nova and Eclipse systems, World Computer Corporation (doing credit union applications) created this date format;

16-bit date field:

128 years = 7 bits (1900+128=2028)
12 months = 4 bits
31 days = 5 bits
Dates were directly comparable using unsigned functions.

No known instances of this format are in use today.

YEAR 2031
Some systems, like MediaTek’s Nucleus OS, only go up to 31 December 2030.

YEAR 2032
Palm OS uses both signed integers with the 1970 epoch, as well as unsigned integers with the 1904 epoch, for different system functions, such as for system clock, and file dates (see PDB format). While this should result in Palm OS being susceptible to the 2038 problem, Palm OS also uses a 7-bit field for storing the year value, with a different epoch counting from 1904, resulting in a maximum year of (1904+127) 2031.

Year 2036

The Network Time Protocol has an overflow issue related to the Year 2038 problem, which manifests itself at 06:28:16 UTC on 7 February 2036, rather than 2038. The 64-bit timestamps used by NTP consist of a 32-bit part for seconds and a 32-bit part for fractional second, giving NTP a time scale that rolls over every 232 seconds (136 years) and a theoretical resolution of 2−32 second (233 picoseconds). NTP uses an epoch of 1 January 1900. The first rollover occurs in 2036, prior to the UNIX year 2038 problem.

YEAR 2038

Unix time rollover

Main article: Year 2038 problem
The original implementation of the Unix operating system stored system time as a 32-bit signed integer representing the number of seconds past the Unix epoch: midnight UTC, 1 January 1970. This value will roll over on 19 January 2038. This problem has been addressed in most modern Unix and Unix-like operating systems by storing system time as a 64-bit signed integer, although individual applications, protocols, and file formats will still need to be changed as well.

DVB rollover

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (September 2020)
The Digital Video Broadcast system has an issue on 22 April 2038, when the 16 bits used to transmit Modified Julian Days used for electronic guide scheduling will restart from zero. The ETSI EN 300 368 specification mentions in Annex C that the provided MJD formulas are valid until 28 February 2100, but makes no mention of the limits imposed by the 16 bits used to transmit the resulting value.[citation needed]

Third GPS rollover

GPS dates are expressed as a week number and a day-of-week number, with the week number transmitted as a ten-bit value. This means that every 1024 weeks (about 19.6 years) after Sunday 6 January 1980 (the GPS epoch), the date resets again to that date; this happened for the first time at 23:59:47 on Saturday 21 August 1999,[7] the second time at 23:59:42 UTC on 6 April 2019, and will happen again on 20 November 2038. To address this concern, modernised GPS navigation messages use a 13-bit field, which only repeats every 8,192 weeks (157 years), and will not return to zero until near the year 2137.

YEAR 2040
Early Apple Macintosh computers store time in their real-time clocks (RTCs) and HFS filesystems as an unsigned 32-bit number of seconds since 00:00:00 on 1 January 1904. After 06:28:15 on 6 February 2040, this will wrap around to 1904. HFS+, the default format for all of Apple’s recent Macintosh computers, is also affected. The replacement Apple File System resolves this issue.

ProDOS for the Apple II computers only supports two-digit year numbers. To avoid Y2K issues, Apple issued a technical note stating that the year number was to represent 1940-2039. Software for the platform may incorrectly display dates beginning in 2040. A third-party effort is underway to update ProDOS and application software to support years up to 2924.

YEAR 2042
On 18 September 2042, the Time of Day Clock (TODC) on the S/370 IBM mainframe and its successors, including the current zSeries, will roll over.

Older TODCs were implemented as a 64-bit count of 2−12 microsecond (0.244 ns) units, and the standard base was 1 January 1900 UT. In July 1999 the extended TODC clock was announced, which extended the clock to the right (that is, the extended bits are less significant than the original bits). The actual resolution depends on the model, but the format is consistent, and will, therefore, roll over after 252 microseconds.

The TODC value is accessible to user mode programs and is often used for timing and for generating unique IDs for events.

While IBM has defined and implemented a longer (128-bit) hardware format on recent machines, which extends the timer on both ends by at least 8 additional bits, many programs continue to rely on the 64-bit format which remains as an accessible subset of the longer timer.

YEAR 2048

The ATSC system will have an issue similar to the DVB issue described above after 2048 due to its use of signed 32-bit GPS seconds that begin from 6 January 1980.

The capacity planning logic in the ERP system SAP S/4HANA supports only finish dates up to 19 January 2048 (24855 days from 1 January 1980). This concerns e.g. the production, maintenance and inspection planning.

YEAR 2050

Various Texas Instruments calculators of the TI BA II Plus, TI BA II Plus Professional, TI-83, TI-84 and NSpire families support a function named dbd to calculate the number of days between dates. This function accepts dates between 1950-01-01 and 2049-12-31 only. One potential area where this will start causing problems in 2020 is in the calculation of 30-year mortgages.

YEAR 2051

The Wii and Nintendo 3DS will roll over at the end of 31 December 2050, rolling back to 1 January 2000. Some games on those consoles that have their own calendar systems, will roll back to a different year determined by the game; such as Animal Crossing: New Leaf, which will roll back to 1 January 2012.

Year 2079

Days 32,768 and 65,536
Programs that store dates as the number of days since an arbitrary date (or epoch) are vulnerable to roll-over or wrap-around effects if the values are not wide enough to allow the date values to span a large enough time range expected for the application. Signed 16-bit binary values roll over after 32,768 (215) days from the epoch date, producing negative values. Some mainframe systems experienced software failures because they had encoded dates as the number of days since 1 January 1900, which produced unexpected negative day numbers on the roll-over date of 18 September 1989. Similarly, unsigned 16-bit binary days counts overflow after 65,536 (216) days, which are truncated to zero values. For software using an epoch of 1 January 1900, this will occur on 6 June 2079.

Year 2080
Some (if not all) Nokia phones that run Series 40 (such as the Nokia X2-00) only support dates up to 2079-12-31 and will refuse to change dates further than 2079-12-31. The workaround is to use the year 1996 in lieu of 2080 as a compatible leap year to display the correct day of the week, date and month on the main screen.

Systems storing the year as a two-digit value 00..99 internally only (like many RTCs) may roll over from 2079-12-31 to the IBM PC and DOS epoch of 1980-01-01.

YEAR 2100
See also: Leap year bug
DOS and Windows file date API and conversion functions (such as INT 21h/AH=2Ah) officially support dates up to 2099-12-31 only (even though the underlying FAT filesystem would theoretically support dates up to 2107). Hence, DOS-based operating systems, as well as applications that convert other formats to the FAT/DOS format, may show unexpected behavior starting 2100-01-01.

Nintendo DS will roll over at the end of 31 December 2099, rolling back to 1 January 2000.

Another problem will emerge at the end of 2100-02-28, since 2100 is not a leap year, whereas many common implementations of the leap year algorithm are incomplete or simplified, and thus will erroneously assume it to be a leap year. This would cause the date to incorrectly roll over from 2100-02-28 to 2100-02-29, instead of directly to 2100-03-01.

Year 2106
Many existing file formats, communications protocols, and application interfaces employ a variant of the Unix time_t date format, storing the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (midnight UTC, 1 January 1970) as an unsigned 32-bit binary integer. This value will roll over on 7 February 2106 at 06:28:15. That is, at this time the number of seconds since 1 January 1970 is FFFF FFFF in hex.

YEAR 2108
The date timestamps stored in FAT filesystems, originally introduced with 86-DOS 0.42 in 25 February 1981 and carried over into MS-DOS, PC DOS, DR-DOS etc., will overflow at the end of 2107-12-31. The last modification date stamp (and with DELWATCH 2.0+ also the file deletion date stamp, and since DOS 7.0+ optionally also the last access date stamp and creation date stamp), are stored in the directory entry with the year represented as an unsigned seven bit number (0–127), relative to 1980, and thereby unable to indicate any dates in the year 2108 and beyond. The API functions defined to retrieve these dates officially only support dates up to 2099-12-31.

This will also affect the ZIP archive file format, as it uses FAT file modification timestamps internally.

YEAR 2137
Main article: GPS Week Number Rollover
See also: GPS § Timekeeping
GPS dates are expressed as a week number and a day-of-week number, with the week number initially using a ten-bit value and modernised GPS navigation messages using a 13-bit field. Ten-bit systems would roll over every 1024 weeks (about 19.6 years) after Sunday 6 January 1980 (the GPS epoch), and 13-bit systems roll over every 8192 weeks. Thirteen-bit systems will roll over to zero in 2137.[7][8]

YEAR 2262
The Go programming language has a UnixNano API that counts nanoseconds since 1970 as a 64-bit signed integer.[44] This value will overflow on 2262-04-11. This is a limitation of similar nanosecond timekeeping systems, such as the Timestamp object in Python pandas, C++ chrono::system_clock or the QEMU timers.

YEAR 4501
Microsoft Outlook uses the date 1 January 4501 as a placeholder for “none” or “empty”.

YEAR 10,000
The year 10,000 will be the first Gregorian year with five digits. Although many people at first consider this year to be so far distant that a problem of this type will never actually occur, certain classes of calculations in disciplines such as astronomy and physics already need to work with years of this magnitude and greater. These applications also have to deal with the Year zero problem. All future powers of 10 years have the potential for similar problems.

“RFC 2550 - Y10K and Beyond” discusses solutions for dealing with this problem.

Year 30,828
Beginning 14 September 30,828, Windows will not accept dates beyond this day and on startup, Windows will complain about “invalid system time”. This is because the FILETIME value in Windows, which is a 64-bit value corresponding to the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since 1 January 1601, 00:00:00.0000000 UTC, will overflow its maximum possible value on that day at 02:48:05.4775808 UTC.[

YEARS 32,768 and 65,536
Programs that process years as 16-bit values may encounter problems dealing with either the year 32,768 or 65,536, depending on whether the value is treated as a signed or unsigned integer.

For the year 32,768 problem, years after 32,767 may be interpreted as negative numbers, beginning with −32,768. The year 65,536 problem is more likely to manifest itself by representing the year 65,536 as the year 0.

YEAR 292,277,026,596 problem
Certain problematic years occur so far in the future, well beyond the likely lifespan of the Earth, the Sun, humanity, and even past some predictions of the lifetime of the universe, that they are mainly referenced as matters of theoretical interest, jokes, or indications that a related problem is not truly solved for any reasonable definition of “solved”. The year 292,277,026,596 problem (about 2.9×1011 years in the future) will occur when the 64-bit Unix time overflows at UTC 15:30:08 on Sunday, 4 December, 292,277,026,596 AD. A similar problem will occur with 128-bit Unix time stored as nanoseconds, which will overflow in the year 5,391,559,471,918,239,498,981 AD (2^127/1000000000 seconds after the Unix epoch in 1970).