Y2.002K Bug Strikes

Washington, D.C. (Associated Poets) --

ike everything else, we've forgotten about it since September 11th, but in the early hours of the morning, it began to wreak havoc on internet-enabled toasters and microchip-controlled automatic toilet flushers everywhere, disrupting the launch of the Euro and prompting worried investors to attempt to wake their brokers out of their champagne-induced sleep with instant messages that never arrived.

The Y2.002K bug has struck.

An obscure bug buried in lines and lines of code written for early, vacuum-tube-powered computers, the Y2.002K bug results when, to save space, palindromic years with zero in them are encoded as a single digit. Since this hasn't happened since 1001, long before the invention of the computer, the bug went unnoticed except to a small group of frantic experts who were unable to come up with a catchy soundbite to refer to it.

How the Bug Works

Say your Lincoln Navigator's fuel injection computer has the Y2.002K bug, and that you're late for a New Year's Eve party high in the Hollywood Hills. You round a corner when the clock strikes midnight, and the computer's date is reset to the year 2 A.D. Since to the computer it appears that -2000 years have just passed, it extrapolates from the rate of fuel consumption that your tank must have hundreds of millions of gallons of gas in it, which it tries to deliver to the engine in a single cycle. This causes a massive explosion which sends your SUV careening off the cliff onto a high-power cable, cutting power to 10,000 homes.

Microsoft Reports Fix

Microsoft quickly announced a fix for the bug, available on its website. Calls to Microsoft's Seattle headquarters resulted in "disconnected" messages and the website was not available at press time.