§ 147.003.Computer Date Failure

The technical definition, and it is broader than the popular understanding of the problem.

A computer date failure is the inability to correctly process, recognize, store, receive, transmit, or in any way use date data: (1) referring to the year 2000 or affected by the transition between the 20th and 21st century or between 1999 and 2000; or (2) with years expressed in a two-digit or four-digit format.

Six verbs cover the failure modes — process, recognize, store, receive, transmit, or in any way use — which reaches a system that accepts a date and mishandles it later as readily as one that rejects it outright.

The second limb is much wider than the first, and easy to miss. It covers date data with years in two-digit or four-digit format — which is every date. On its face that reaches date-handling failures having nothing to do with the century rollover.

Read alongside the scope provision, which requires harm caused by such a failure, the chapter’s protections may extend to date-processing defects generally rather than to the millennium alone.

Whether that reading would prevail was never tested, because the litigation the chapter anticipated did not materialise in volume.

The narrow limb captures the actual problem: systems storing years as two digits, unable to distinguish 2000 from 1900, and the arithmetic that produced across the rollover.