A slew of software fails on February 29, from Citrix’ virtual machine software, to Sophos Server, to self-service gas pumps in New Zealand, proved once again that programmers still don’t have a contingency plan to deal with Leap Day.
The New Zealand Herald (through Ars Technica), noted that petrol pumps across the country were out of service for ‘more than ten hours’ due to the bug, which is hitting New Zealand first due to its location in the world – or, more excitingly, the magic of spacetime.
Beeping computer reported issues with Citrix and Sophos products as they occurred, with Citrix advising users to manually change the date on their systems while disabling the automatic date change feature in their operating system. Sophos Server and Endpoint users, meanwhile, encountered issues with SSL and TLS certificate warnings, which depend on system time synchronization. advisedsimply, to disable SSL/TLS decryption for the day.
Leap day calendar wizardry
Leap days occur because although the year as defined by the Gregorian calendar is 365 days, it takes 365.24 days for the Earth to revolve around the sun. Every four years, an extra day is added to the calendar, so that the average length of a year corresponds.
But despite Leap Day being something you can literally set your watch to, companies somehow still end up in this mess every time. In fact, people have always been procrastinators – 1999 was a big year for computer programmers who figured out how to prevent planes from falling out of the sky on January 1, 2000, despite having had years to figure it out.
And while John Scott, CEO of Invenco Group, the company that supplies the affected self-service terminals across New Zealand, said it was investigating what caused the New Zealand-specific outage, an oil company representative said, of greenhouse gas giant Allied Petroleum, seemed less moved to take action when asked about it on Facebook, which is obviously the right forum for it.
We depend on technology, so where is the urgency?
“We will add it to our Outlook reminders (questioning emoji),” said the poor, maligned social media intern. So they’re joking, but if you follow the thinking, it’s emblematic of the fact that we end up here every four years, and it’s just accepted as a fact of life. The intern may be having fun, but you can bet that oil company executives were actively pursuing every lost piece of business this year, four years ago, eight years ago, etc., so it’s anyone’s guess why this keeps happening .
Anyway, it’s March now, so we’ll see you in four years.