Interest rates are the amount of money a lender, such as a bank, charges a customer, such as an individual or business, for a loan. As December 31, 1999, turned into January 1, 2000, computers might interpret December 31, 1999, turning into January 1, 1900.īanks, which calculate interest rates on a daily basis, faced real problems. Activities that were programmed on a daily or yearly basis would be damaged or flawed. Engineers shortened the date because data storage in computers was costly and took up a lot of space.Īs the year 2000 approached, computer programmers realized that computers might not interpret 00 as 2000, but as 1900. Instead of a date reading 1970, it read 70.
When complicated computer programs were being written during the 1960s through the 1980s, computer engineers used a two-digit code for the year. So, Y2K stands for Year 2000.) Many skeptics believe it was barely a problem at all. The flaw, faced by computer programmers and users all over the world on January 1, 2000, is also known as the 'millennium bug.' (The letter K, which stands for kilo (a unit of 1000), is commonly used to represent the number 1,000. The Y2K bug was a computer flaw, or bug, that may have caused problems when dealing with dates beyond December 31, 1999.
