A lazy fix 20 years ago means the Y2K bug is taking down computers now

Parking meters, cash registers and a professional wrestling video game have fallen foul of a computer glitch related to the Y2K bug. The Y2020 bug, which has taken many payment and computer systems offline, is a long-lingering side effect of attempts to fix the Y2K, or millennium bug. Both stem from the way computers store dates. Many older systems express years using two numbers – 98, for instance, for 1998 – in an effort to save memory. The Y2K bug was a fear that computers would treat 00 as 1900, rather than 2000.