Oz bank thinks it's 2016
Y2.01K bug invalidates cards
Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
A new year bug has scuppered card transactions at thousands of Australian shops for four days so far, because systems at the Bank of Queensland say it is now 2016.
The glitch has meant most debit cards have effectively expired.
In the ensuing chaos, shops served by Bank of Queensland have been forced to introduce temporary manual workarounds, Business Day reports.
The bank has provided a code for merchants to punch into their point of sale machines, which tells the system to ignore the date. Others are using old hand-operated carbon paper machines to record transactions.
Bank of Queensland today said it is still investigating the cause of the problems with its EFTPOS system. Other Australian banks that use the same processing network have not been affected.
"There is an issue with the time and date stamp on Bank of Queensland EFTPOS terminals and we are working with our service providers, Keycorp and First Data, to address this issue as a priority," a spokeswoman told the The Age.
The Bank of Queensland supplies a total of 8,065 EFTPOS terminals. The spokeswoman said a "large percentage" are affected.
Separately today, AAP reports that an EDS worker has been jailed for nine years for stealing almost AUS$3m from Bank of Queensland. Reecson Wentworth Denford, 24, used his access as a contractor to the bank's systems to siphon off large sums over a 20-month period, to fund a lavish lifestyle.
Denford's defence said he had initially hoped his discovery of a loophole would impress managers, but admitted he instead used it to impress his "much older wife", who has now left him. ®
COMMENTS
@Maverick
So, what you're saying is that a lot of people are convinced that AGW is not happening based upon little to no knowledge, but are nonetheless happy to shout about it. I think you've hit the nail on the head there.
@Ken Hagan
Here we go again. Another ignorant troll from somebody who has no idea of what they are talking about. The Y2K work we did was not some big con, but "non-knowledgeable" morons like you will never accept that we actually did any work because you didn't see anything go wrong and would prefer to believe that it was a big conspiracy to con poor old you.
We "time-travelled" one of our mainframes and discovered over 2,000 instances of Y2K code faults which we had to correct, unit test, system test, integration test and user acceptance test. That's just one mainframe, let alone the others, or the mid-range systems/applications, or the faults that time-travelling the systems didn't reveal but could only be found by going through the code, line by fucking line.
Then of course, there's the huge savings we made and efficiency we gained (from economies of scale) from all the other non-Y2K bugs we found and fixed during the process.
If you think it was a waste of time, then you're the kind of idiot we can well do without in IT.
Vindicated
When Y2K came around and nothing happened, I always said it was because us code monkeys prepared for it and solved it before it became a problem. But when nothing happened, everybody said we were full of shit. They never realised that nothing happened not because it was just hype, but because we prevented it.
And this sort of thing is what happens when we don't expect it and thus can't prepare for it. And this is a minor glitch compared to what Y2K would have been. So now, all of you who took the piss out of us coders when Y2K failed to materialise, imagine how much worse than this it would have been if we'd just sat on our arses and did nothing.
Roll on January 2038... we'll fix that one too, never fear. (64-bit time = start 0 at the Big Bang and wrap 584.5 billion years on - never a problem again!)
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