It wasn't the first time Britons experienced Y2K problems. 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 cause system failures or corrupt data.
On Wednesday, the credit card machines, manufactured by Racal Electronics, failed to approve the credit cards because of a software problem, a HSBC bank spokeswoman said. The bank's new swipe card terminals were programmed to look ahead four working days in processing merchant transactions to ensure they are registered within that time period, HSBC spokeswoman Nicolette Dawson said. Linda Stryker, a public relations executive for HSBC in the United States, said the error was specific to software used in British machines and should not affect U.S. credit card swiping machines. At the height of problems in October, several retailers were reporting shortages that forced them to turn to other candymakers to fill bare shelves. And in Maine, owners of 2000-model cars and trucks received titles identifying their new vehicles as ''horseless carriages,'' the designation used for vintage vehicles produced before 1916.