Germany’s 2010 bug

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Remember the Y2K bug? Well, Germany is experiencing a computer glitch, 10 years after millennium bug. It’s a software problem that’s preventing computers from recognizing “2010″ on credit cards. David Hecht checked it out for us.

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JEB SHARP: A little over ten years ago, we were in the grip of Y2K panic, the fear that computers would stop working at the turn of millennium because they weren’t programmed to recognize dates after 1999.  Billions of dollars were spent on trying to avert a disaster, and in the end, things went smoothly.  So few people were worried last week about the start of the new decade.  Turns out in Germany, they should have been.  David Hecht has the story from Berlin.

DAVID HECHT: Last Thursday, as the clocks struck midnight, some 30 million credit and ATM cards in Germany stopped working. That’s around a third of all the cards issued in the country. Manfred Westphal is with Germany’s consumer affairs office.   He says there’s a glitch in the cards’ chips.

MANFRED WESTPHAL: The problem is with the wrong programming of the chip so that the ATMs and the systems in the retail trade cannot read the date on the chip.

HECHT: And that is a problem.  But Westphal says consumers and retailers have come up with innovative ways to get around it.

WESTPHAL: They are putting Scotch tape over the chip so the chip will not be read but the magnetic strip will be read. During the last days it has allowed some retailers to get along with this problem. But this of course is not the solution.

HECHT: Germans aren’t used to improvising banking solutions. They pride themselves on having a solid foolproof system and thinking ahead to prevent problems. Westphal said Germans were particularly vigilant about Y2K.

WESTPHAL: There was a lot of preparation in Germany for the year 2000. All the software programs were updated and prepared for the switch.

HECHT: In fact with this Y2010K problem, many Germans are pointing the finger at the French company that made the card chips.  Westphal says the company has accepted responsibility, but that doesn’t let the Germans off the hook.

WESTPHAL: German Banks didn’t check before if the system works. German banks and banking associations have not prepared in a correct way.

HECHT: Not surprisingly the bank association responsible for issuing the cards has stressed how quickly it’s responded to the problem. Michaela Roth is a representative.

MICHAELA ROTH: [speaking in German] Our crisis response system worked very, very well and that certainly wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t had a modern system to quickly sort out the problem.

HECHT: She says nearly all the bank machines in Germany have been reprogrammed to accept the faulty cards, and by next Monday all German retailers will be able to accept the cards as well.  But there’s still a problem.  The faulty cards may not work in other countries, and right now, many Germans are away on vacation, so they may have some trouble paying their hotel bills.  For The World, I’m David Hecht in Berlin

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