Parking Meters Fail All Over New York Due to Year 2020 Bug

It's not quite the airplanes falling out of the sky scenario we all feared in the year 2000.

But 20 years after the infamous Y2K hysteria, parking meters all over New York are failing because a 2020 bug.

The Department of Transportation has admitted the software running the meters had an "established end date" of January 1, 2020; it blamed the company that makes it — Parkeon — for failing to update it.

As a result, tens of thousands of terminals across the city have been refusing to accept credit card payments from frustrated drivers since the turn of the new year.

"The software in the model of Parkeon meter used in New York City had established an end date of January 1, 2020 - and had never been updated by the company," the DoT said in a statement.

It pointed out however that drivers can still pay with cash, or by using credit cards via the ParkNYC app — if they happen to have either, that is.

Technicians have been dispatched throughout NY to address the problem this week; however there is still no word on how long it will take to fix.

In the meantime, parking tickets and fines continued to be dished out as normal. Transport officials have yet to make any indication they will be waived; however they said they will meet with city's department of finance to discuss the matter of cars ticketed during this period.

In 1999, fear of the of the so-called Y2K Bug or Millennium Bug — in which computer systems were predicted to fail because programs which only used two digit dates would not be able to distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000 — reached a peak.

It was estimated around $300billion was spent worldwide preparing for it; very few reported problems materialized in the end.

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