CentralNotice From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation , search Animation showing how the date would reset, represented as a signed 32-bit integer (at 03:14:08 UTC on 19 January 2038). The Year 2038 problem is an issue for computing and data storage situations in which time values are stored or calculated as a signed 32-bit integer , and this number is interpreted as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 (the epoch ). [1] Such implementations cannot encode times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038, a problem similar to but not entirely analogous to the Y2K problem (also known as the Millennium Bug), in which 2-digit values representing the number of years since 1900 could not encode the year 2000 or later. Most 32-bit Unix-like systems store and manipulate time in this Unix time format, so the year 2038 problem is sometimes ...