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In the press
Summaries of press on the Unix overflow, the GPS week rollover, NTP 2036, and DVB-SI. Each item links to the original. Sports and energy “2038” headlines are not included.
Without backup plans, global IT outages will happen again
After the CrowdStrike outage, Reuters put the Year 2038 problem next to Y2K: signed 32-bit Unix time runs out at 03:14 GMT on 19 January 2038. Former NCSC head Ciarán Martin is quoted on how brittle administration already is when a single vendor fails.
Y2K, 25 years on
A look back at the millennium bug notes the 2038 overflow as the next well-known date bug. One engineer in the piece is not worried: most systems will be on 64-bit time, or will be replaced, before the wrap.
GPS rollover is today. Here’s why devices might get wacky
TechCrunch covered the 10-bit GPS week reset of 6 April 2019. That event is a cousin of Unix Y2038, not the same bug. The next legacy GPS week rollover on this site’s calendar is 20 November 2038.
Is the Year 2038 problem the new Y2K bug?
The paper walked through signed 32-bit time_t and said not to panic if machines are upgraded. Its date line is wrong: it says 03:14:07 UTC on 19 March. The overflow is 19 January 2038. The useful point still holds — systems that schedule far ahead can fail years before that second.
The Unix end times are upon us
Wired tied the 19 January 2038 wrap to the May 2006 AOLserver crashes. A one-billion-second timeout looked past the 32-bit horizon, the expiry date flipped into the past, and the process died. Changing the timeout fixed it.
Beyond 2000: further troubles lurk in the future of computing
During the Y2K run-up the Times listed later date bombs, including Y2038 on Unix: seconds since 1 January 1970 run out at 3:14:07 a.m. on 19 January 2038. It used a 30-year mortgage issued in 2009 as the reason to care decades early.
The next millennium headache
Dennis Ritchie told Wired that by 2038, time_t would be 64-bit “assuming Unix survives.” Capers Jones compared the delay to the same reasoning that left Y2K in old code.
Checked 7 October 2026. No new Unix Y2038, time_t, NTP 2036, GPS week or DVB-SI piece in the previous 14 days at Reuters, AP, the New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian, Wired, Ars Technica or TechCrunch. A 6 October Reuters story is the 2036 Olympics shortlist, not a clock bug.
Related: What the Year 2038 problem is, timeline.