Roland Perry wrote on 02 Jan 2016 at 09:50 ...
In message
-sept
ember.org, at 09:38:40 on Sat, 2 Jan 2016, Recliner
remarked:

I wonder if this is a random fault, or a "Y2K" type of problem.

I remember when the Nottingham City Transport smartcard had one of the
latter at New Year in around 2006.

I notice that the handwritten sign says that contactless cards should be
used as normal, so the fault was specifically with the Oyster system. Apart
from the change of year, there was also the normal New Year's free travel
-- I wonder if the attempt to re-set to normal chargeable travel failed?

The free travel thing points even more to a Y2K style problem, if the
charging system wasn't active yesterday. In the Nottingham case it
wasn't spotted until the 2nd because no buses ran on the 1st.

ps I note some NatWest debit cards had outages on the 1st: another Y2K
problem perhaps.

For decades, computer systems have exhibited faults after a holiday
period, caused often by problems in restarting hardware or software
after a holiday outage or reverting to normal operation after
non-standard holiday operation, or caused by changes to the system that
were applied during the holiday. Why are you assuming that this
particular instance was in any way similar to Y2K?

--
Richard J.
(to email me, swap 'uk' and 'yon' in address)