Talk:Year 2038 problem

Time zone is irrelevant
The article states that that the problem occurs at a certain moment UTC. I think this is incorrect. The problem is insensitive to timezone settings. The reference to timezone should be removed. The problem itself will occur first in the place that celebrates new year first. It is possible to mention UTC in a second order context such as 'Computers that have their clock set to UTC and show local time to end users will be affected when the overflow occurs in timezone UTC'. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wilberth (talk • contribs) 07:24, 22 April 2024 (UTC)


 * The Unix clock is measured against UTC, so the problem happens at a particular time on the UTC clock. David Malone (talk) 07:28, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

The term "bug" seems to be out of place
Why is this being called a bug when this is entirely by design, known and resolved if you switch to modern systems using 64b time_t?

A bug would suggest an unintended/unforseen behavior, the "2k38 problem" has been a known limitation of 32b unix time since it's inception and was a presumably conscious decision balancing the needs and the limitations of hardware/storage at the time with the understanding that there was plenty of time for systems to grow to a point where using 64b time_t was feasible (as it is now more than 15 years before we reach the "deadline"). --Keeper of the Keys (talk) 16:41, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Even just for internal consistency, I changed the link to Time formatting and storage bugs to show as time storage problem. With few exceptions, the page uses the word problem and not bug. --JimN48997 (talk) 23:37, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Why signed?
Why is this a signed 32 bit integer? Is there any particular reason? 188.147.100.26 (talk) 01:30, 17 December 2023 (UTC)


 * So that times before the epoch can be stored. David Malone (talk) 13:57, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Additional citations?
In Jan. 2024 Year 2038 problem has received the "Needs more citations" flag. It's a brief article with 29 citations and most of them seem reliable at a glance. This page recently received an influx of views due to being linked by a comment on a popular Reddit post. Now, has it been flagged because many if not most or all citations are news articles, or what? Warm Yellow Sunflower (talk) 17:51, 7 February 2024 (UTC)


 * User:Zerbu added More citations needed on 5 January 2024, without any specific details in his edit summary, nor a topic on this talk page.  In my opinion there are sufficient citations for an article of this size, and all citations are sufficiently reliable.  I share User:Warm Yellow Sunflower's confusion about exactly why User:Zebru added this template?   Unless User:Zerbu or others jump into this talk to share their concerns, I recommend that More citations needed be removed from this article in the next few weeks. -- netjeff (talk) 20:48, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I removed the template. There's plenty of citations in the article. Sure there's some unsourced passages but that's pretty normal; doesn't necessitate a template. TarkusAB talk / contrib 22:25, 25 March 2024 (UTC)