February 14th 2016

Apple’s iOS plagued by a bug which saw users’ phone being set to Jan 1st, 1970, unable to boot back into the phone. This included being unable to restore the phone.

1st Jan 1970 is known as Unix epoch time where all times are based from. This is considered the ‘start’ of time in terms of computers. iOS stores this as a signed integer and if the user selects the first date in epoc time, the time flip to negative , breaking the OS.

One thing to highlight is that all unix os depend on the 32bit epoc time number. This results in the Year 2038 problem where we can no longer store time. This will affect everything unix based, from airplane systems to the average mac book.  Y2k bug should serve as a reminder to fix the problem now, rather than later.