Roland Perry wrote on 02 Jan 2016 at 11:32 ...
In message , at 11:12:16 on Sat, 2 Jan
2016, Richard J. remarked:
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?

Firstly, because a very similar incident *was* tracked down to that
cause,

You mean there was a very similar incident 16 years ago? But what is
special about 1/1/2016 compared to 1/1/2015, 1/1/2014, etc?

and secondly the other routine issues you mention ought to be
well understood and planned for during a holiday period.

In theory, yes, but in practice there is always a greater risk of a
problem following a period of non-standard operations. This is
especially so if you're doing a major update of fare tables across the
network, which might be "routine" in the sense that you do it every
year, but is still a more obvious likely cause than some previously
unknown fundamental problem connected with 1/1/2016.

Plus the fact they are having to talk to their suppliers to work out a
fix, rather than applying a clue-bat to the sysadmin-du-jour.

Quite normal if there's a major system outage. It doesn't tell you
anything about the cause.
--
Richard J.
(to email me, swap 'uk' and 'yon' in address)