Think-Security

As 2009 turned into 2010, users of Symantec's Endpoint Protection Manager ran into trouble with updates for the program, as any patches released after the end of 2009 were misidentified as being out-of-date.

The company quickly released a series of stop-gap patches, which work around the problem by giving their release date as December 31, 2009, but no full solution has yet been released by Symantec, though The Register reports that programmers there are working "around the clock " to issue a fix.

Several other large security companies suffered from similar "Y2K10"-related issues, including Cisco and Apache. Datamation reports that German bank customers have encountered problems using their debit or credit cards due to the date-related glitches, and users of Apache's SpamAssassin email filtering system will see most of their 2010-dated email stopped as spam until the issue can be resolved. (The company recently released both a workaround and a patch to fix the problem.)

Some experts have said that the 2010-related problems outstripped the more famous "Y2K" glitches, which notoriously failed to cause the kind of widespread confusion that many predicted.