Google Facing Y2K7 Problem

By Nathan Weinberg

Two Google services have broken in the new year, most likely due to code that failed when the clock struck 2007.

Ionut Alex notes that the Gmail storage counter, which usually adds a third of a megabyte of storage to your inbox every day, stopped incrementing at midnight this morning. Gmail remains frozen at 2800 gigabytes of storage, which is plenty, and a reasonable enough number that it may even be by design. I’m guessing Google will either fix it and say nothing, or freeze the counter and declare 2.8 GB to be the new Gmail storage limit (so much for Infinity + 1).

Also, Google’s calculator is broken. That is unequivocally accurate. I can’t find a single search that normally used the calculator that now works. Try 1+1, 2+2, 4 * 2 or 15/3. Currency conversions still work, which is odd, because I thought they were on similar systems The currency conversions stopped working just after I wrote that sentence, which is just bizarre. Philipp has screenshots.

I can imagine there would be computer systems that would fail on a certain date, including the first of 2007. I just figured it would mostly be code written twenty years ago, not 18 months ago.

UPDATE: Calculator is back working again, at around 10:40 pm. It was basically down since midnight, but considering nobody was likely working today, I’d call that decently fast.

Posted:
January 1, 2007 by Nathan Weinberg in:
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4 Responses to “Google Facing Y2K7 Problem”

  1. Jason Schramm Says:

    It was working last night, and now today it doesn’t. This is definitely a step back.

  2. Jason Schramm Says:

    And now it works again.

  3. David Says:

    “Oh, and you still have over 2800 megabytes (and counting) of free storage.”

    That was on the Gmail website, mine is still at 2800, i dont care very much because i have only used 5% of the storage.

  4. dev Says:

    Is it just me, or does anyone have problems with the pages from this blog rendering properly in Firefox?
    The main page of the blog seems all messed up, and it’s been happening since a week or two.

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