- Japan experienced a number of minor problems yesterday as a result of computer bugs associated with the millennium leap year.
First to announce problems was the Meteorological Agency, which said it saw some glitches with its Automated Meteorological Data Acquisition System (AMeDAS) network of weather monitoring stations, according to local media reports.
Some of the stations in western and southwestern Japan reported erroneous rain, wind and temperature measurements in the early hours of the morning, said the agency.
The second failure experienced hit the ATM network of the Post Office which saw service at around 5% of its 25,000 machines nationwide affected. The Post Office said the machines printed receipts bearing the date March 1.
The only other problem reported by Japanese media today was a disruption to the seismic monitoring system in two prefectures in northeastern Japan. The systems functioned normally but displayed the date as March 1.
The date-related problems occur because today, February 29, is a special leap year. It occurs only in millennium years and is designed to correct slight offsets in the Gregorian calendar which normally corrects for the 365.25 days per year once every four years.