Timeline

The overflow date is fixed. The work, and the early failures, are not.

Date	What happened
1970-01-01	Unix epoch. Seconds-since-epoch becomes the portable time representation.
2006-05-13	AOLserver: a 1×10⁹ second timeout overflowed a 32-bit time and crashed the service — 31 years early.
2012	NetBSD 6.0 ships 64-bit time_t.
2014	OpenBSD 5.5 follows. ntpd era handling for 2036 exists in stable ntpd.
2019-04-06	Second GPS 10-bit week rollover. Consumer devices fail; not a Unix time_t event.
2020-03	Linux 5.6: 64-bit time on 32-bit architectures, aimed at embedded.
2020-12	Linux 5.10: XFS `bigtime` extends on-disk timestamps to 2486.
2021-08	glibc 2.34: `_TIME_BITS=64` on 32-bit Linux 5.6+.
2022-01	BBC iPlayer UI shows a 18 January 2038 cutoff on some items — a public glimpse of a 32-bit bound.
2024–2025	Debian time64 transition for 32-bit ports except i386, landing with Debian 13 “Trixie”.
2025	BBC R&D / Nagra / DVB document a 16-bit MJD rollover in DVB-SI on 23 April 2038.
2026-06	ITU-T SG17 agrees XSTP.epoch text on 2036/2038/2106-class events. FIRST Time SIG coordinates.
2036-02-07	NTP era 0 → 1. Packet seconds field wraps.
2038-01-19	Unix signed time32 overflows at 03:14:07 UTC.
2038-04-23	DVB-SI 16-bit MJD convention rolls unless receivers implement the new mapping.
2038-11-20	Third GPS legacy week-number rollover.
2106-02-07	Unsigned 32-bit Unix time overflows.

Primary sources for current engineering status: Linux kernel changelogs, glibc manual for _TIME_BITS, Debian wiki “64-bit time”, GPS.gov week-number page, DVB Scene 66 (September 2025), Meinberg NTP rollover notes.