this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
766 points (94.5% liked)

Linux

48685 readers
576 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

This isn't a gloat post. In fact, I was completely oblivious to this massive outage until I tried to check my bank balance and it wouldn't log in.

Apparently Visa Paywave, banks, some TV networks, EFTPOS, etc. have gone down. Flights have had to be cancelled as some airlines systems have also gone down. Gas stations and public transport systems inoperable. As well as numerous Windows systems and Microsoft services affected. (At least according to one of my local MSMs.)

Seems insane to me that one company's messed up update could cause so much global disruption and so many systems gone down :/ This is exactly why centralisation of services and large corporations gobbling up smaller companies and becoming behemoth services is so dangerous.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] axzxc1236@lemm.ee 35 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

I am born too late to understand what Y2K problem was, this (the result) might be what people thought could happen.

[–] HumanPenguin@feddit.uk 39 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Yep pretty much but on a larger scale.

1st please do not believe the bull that there was no problem. Many folks like me were paid to fix it before it was an issue. So other than a few companies, few saw the result, not because it did not exist. But because we were warned. People make jokes about the over panic. But if that had not happened, it would hav been years to fix, not days. Because without the panic, most corporations would have ignored it. Honestly, the panic scared shareholders. So boards of directors had to get experts to confirm the systems were compliant. And so much dependent crap was found running it was insane.

But the exaggerations of planes falling out of the sky etc. Was also bull. Most systems would have failed but BSOD would be rare, but code would crash and some works with errors shutting it down cleanly, some undiscovered until a short while later. As accounting or other errors showed up.

As other have said. The issue was that since the 1960s, computers were set up to treat years as 2 digits. So had no expectation to handle 2000 other than assume it was 1900. While from the early 90s most systems were built with ways to adapt to it. Not all were, as many were only developing top layer stuff. And many libraries etc had not been checked for this issue. Huge amounts of the infra of the world's IT ran on legacy systems. Especially in the financial sector where I worked at the time.

The internet was a fairly new thing. So often stuff had been running for decades with no one needing to change it. Or having any real knowledge of how it was coded. So folks like me were forced to hunt through code or often replace systems that were badly documented or more often not at all.

A lot of modern software development practices grew out of discovering what a fucking mess can grow if people accept an "if it ain't broke, don't touch it" mentality.

[–] sep@lemmy.world 11 points 5 months ago

Was there patching systems and testing they survived the rollover months before it happened.
One software managed the rollover. But failed the year after. They had quickly coded in an explicit exception for 00. But then promptly forgot to fix it properly!.

[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Kinda I guess. It was about clocks rolling over from 1999 to 2000 and causing a buffer overflow that would supposedly crash all systems everywhere causing the country to come to a hault.

[–] caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 26 points 5 months ago

And it was okay because a lot of people worked really really hard to make it be okay.

[–] Hildegarde@lemmy.world 22 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Most old systems used two digits for years. The year would go from 99 to 0. Any software doing a date comparison will get a garbage result. If a task needs to be run every 5 minutes, what will the software do if that task was last run 99 years from now? It will not work properly.

Governments and businesses spent lots of money and time patching critical systems to handle the date change. The media made a circus out of it, but when the year rolled over, everything was fine.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

Also a lot of people were "on call" to handle any problems when the year changed, so the few problem that had passed unnoticed when doing the fixed and did pop up when the year changed, got solved a lot faster than they normally would.

[–] psud@aussie.zone 5 points 5 months ago

One program I tested went from (31,12,99) to (01,01,100). Its front end formatted the date and added the century, so it showed 1 January 2000 as 01/01/19100

That wasn't fixed. The fault didn't affect processing (the years were wrong but had the correct offset between them) and was only visible to internal users, and also that system was expected to be retired in 2004

[–] cannedtuna@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)

We also got the worst version of Windows ever, ME. Tho maybe with all the BS they’ve done with 11 that might change.

[–] zod000@lemmy.ml 8 points 5 months ago

I'm not sure I'd stick to calling it the worst version "ever" since MS is trying really hard to out do themselves.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 7 points 5 months ago

I'd use ME before the adware that is the current version. It wasn't that bad, it was just Win98 with some visual slop on top that crashed slightly more often.

[–] pirat@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

Millennium Editions ruin everything!! 🤬

[–] caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 4 points 5 months ago

Y2K was going to be the end of civilisation. This was basically done by the time I woke up today.