Unless you've only recently started using Windows, you're probably aware of the famous or infamous Millennium Bug (Y2K), which many believed would bring disaster to the digital world as the millennium (2000) approached. If you don't know yet, Y2K has its roots in using two digits instead of four digits to represent years.


Although this was no problem before 1999, at midnight on December 31st, in the year 2000, the digital time bomb was about to explode. Huge efforts were made to defuse this time bomb, and fortunately, most of them worked.

Recently, a similar incident occurred in 2022, when a Microsoft Exchange server failed, and the media decided to call it the "Y2K22" incident.

It is believed that something similar will happen in 2038. Y2K38 or Epochalypse is also a time-related bug related to the way Unix time runs on 32-bit operating systems, since time is stored as 32-bit integers, and Windows is no exception.

Unix time, also known as POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) time, is a time measurement method that counts the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970. This date is known as the Unix Epoch, and therefore the "Epochalypse". Under such operating systems, date values ​​are stored as signed 32-bit integers representing the number of seconds since January 1, 1970. At approximately 3:14 on January 19, 2038, the 32-bit integer overflowed, causing the system to interpret the date value as December 13, 1901.

Security researcher and Twitter (now

While these systems are expected to be plagued by January 19, 2038, another X user, BobPony, interestingly discovered that Windows Media Player (WMP) 6 and earlier were already immune to the Y2K bug, while 7 and newer were not.

It should be reminded that Windows Media Player version 6 was released with Windows 2000 and is also available in Windows XP, but it is hidden. This means that versions of applications released in the Windows 95, 98, 2000 and XP era will for some reason not be affected by another cataclysm.

It is worth noting that starting from Windows NT3.1, Windows has supported 32-bit. This reminds me of a fun little experiment we did recently that hinted at the incredible backwards compatibility of Windows.

Ultimately, though, this may not be a problem because Windows 11 only exists in 64-bit mode, and the last supported version of Windows 10 is Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2021, with an end-of-support date scheduled for January 13, 2032.