The Microsoft Azure problem yesterday? Leap year day bug.

[thewayne]

Apparently it was an issue with security certificates because of leap year day that affected the management console, the actual data service was available to users.

Color me amused.

http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2012/02/leap-day-azure-outage/

http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/03/01/1452225/azure-failure-was-a-leap-year-glitch


Microsoft also had problems with the Zune for New Year's Eve 2008 because of leap year issues. Sounds like (a) they have a math problem and (b) they aren't particularly learning from their mistakes.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/156240/microsoft_says_leap_year_bug_caused_zune_failures.html

Comments

[silveradept]

Microsoft seems to have issues with this kind of things - as I recall, the big Y2K bug was because of a design in a Microsoft operating system...

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I was working for the police dept when Y2K hit. We worked all night, testing and re-testing. All of our PC-based software rolled over without a hitch. The system that crashed was the dispatch system. It was on a HP 3000 high-availability mini-computer, and the way that source code was made executable was that it was first compiled, then run through a link/edit step, after which it was executable. Somehow someone forgot to do the link/edit step, so when the code flipped live at midnight, *KABOOM!*

Fortunately we were prepared, and all the most experienced operators were on-shift who had all of the precinct maps memorized and had no problem dispatching calls and keeping track of units on 3x5 index cards and in their heads.

Motorola wanted to take us to the cleaners over Y2K. Our patrol car MDT's were (probably) 8088's running Windows 3.0, which definitely wasn't Y2K compatible. Moto wanted $500 per unit, utterly out of the question. Turns out that when a user logs on to the MDT that it downloads the time stamp from the mainframe, so we just had all users sign off and on when midnight rolled around. No problem.

You'd think that as much as libraries get refined, and as tricky as date math can be, that this shouldn't be a problem, yet it still creeps up every now and then.

[silveradept]

You would think. At least we have something like the Long Now foundation to get us thinking on proper long-term scales...