The “year 2000 bug” scare left us hanging with a sense of anticlimax as only a handful of web sites exhibited a wrong display of date and no other problem specific to the date reared its head.

This year, however, millions of credit-card bearers found themselves unable to make any purchase or to draw money from ATMs at the turn of the year. This took place in Germany.

As you may or may not know, European credit cards are equipped with a “smart chip” which replaces the magnetic strip (there is still a magnetic strip, but it’s used only in the few places that are not equipped with chip readers, or outside Europe). When you use the card in a properly equipped shop (or ATM), it lets you “sign” the transaction by entering a PIN code instead of physically signing a slip of paper.

The German credit cards made by one major manufacturer (name undisclosed) – and used by several large banks – had a bug in the smart chip program, which made the cards “think” that 2010 was not a valid year number, leaving their bearers stranded with no money as of 00:00 on 01/01/10.