problem affecting digital systems that store system time as a signed 32-bit integer
An animated visual of the bug in action. The overflow error will occur at 03:14:08 UTC on 19 January 2038. The year 2038 problem (also known as Y2038, Y2K38, Y2K38 superbug, or the Epochalypse) is a time computing problem that leaves some computer systems unable to represent times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.
The problem exists in systems which measure Unix time—the number of seconds elapsed since the Unix epoch (00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970)—and store it in a signed 32-bit integer. When the data type's maximum value is exceeded, the integer will overflow to its minimum value, which systems will interpret as in the past. The problem resembles the year 2000 problem, but arises from limitations in base-2 (binary) time representation, rather than base-10.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).