Britain had been hit by another, though less serious problem. In August, thousands of London residents lost power for days after the city's main utility distributed faulty smart cards designed to be year-2000 ready. The microchip-embedded cards caused customers' electric meters to shut down until they could be manually repaired. The so-called Y2K bug stems from programming that expressed years in two digits. Left uncorrected, the bug causes computers and microcircuits to mistake the year 2000 for 1900.
Faulty fixes are also a problem and can also cause system failures or corrupt data.
Shopkeepers were advised that in lieu of telephoning for authorization they could process cards by pressing a sequence of keys into the terminals before swiping the card. An HSBC helpline was set up to help them through the sequence, but some retailers complained they still couldn't figure out how to make their swipe machines function properly. This is only a minor glitch. It is typical of the sort of problem that it was expected would need to be dealt with over this period. The Daily Camera.