Time travelers beware: Reddit user "DeadMan3000" warned Gigabyte motherboard owners yesterday to make sure they don't mistakenly set the date past January 18, 3001 if they plan to install the Windows 10 November 2019 Update on their systems.
Failing to heed that advice could "result in a lockup at first boot," DeadMan3000 said, even if the date is changed in the BIOS. And so we have the Y3K bug to follow the Y2K bug that caused mass panic as the millennium approached two decades ago.
YouTuber Carey Holzman demonstrated the bug affecting Gigabyte motherboards that support Intel and AMD chipsets alike. But there is some good news: people have to manually enter a date past January 18, 3001 for the bug to affect them.
Is this ideal? No. It's easy to make typos while entering dates, and nobody should have to deal with boot problems because they accidentally skipped a few centuries. Ideally people would be able to enter any date they please without problems.
Luckily we have 980 years, 10 months and 17 days for Microsoft and Gigabyte to address this problem before it's actually cause for concern. We're probably going to have far greater obstacles to overcome in the intervening centuries.
Leap Day, Though...
More frustrating than the Y3K bug were the errors caused by the Leap Day that occurred on Saturday. It seems like some systems weren't ready for there to be a February 29, 2020 even though the day's existence shouldn't have been a surprise.
Microsoft software engineer Matt Johnson-Pint has been collecting some of these Leap Day bugs on his blog. The issues were more widespread than one might expect, and several of them remain unresolved, so they're of greater priority than Y3K.
This seems to be the year of date-related software problems. Some devices couldn't handle 2020 at all (who can relate?) when it arrived on January 1. Now we're reached March 2 and there are already of these problems. How many more will there be?