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Year 2038
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Year 2038
Why 2038?

First, the good news: all current GSP Virtual Servers are 64-bit and 2038-ready.

Our legacy 32-bit root servers used the FreeBSD operating system. As with all Unix and Unix-like operating systems, time and dates in FreeBSD are represented internally as the number of seconds since the UNIX Epoch, which was the 1st of January 1970 GMT.

Systems with a signed 32-bit time_t can only represent values from 0 to 231-1 (2,147,483,647 seconds, or about 68 years), which means they cannot represent any time beyond 19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM GMT. One second later the counter wraps to a negative number, and affected clocks jump back to 13 Dec 1901 at 8:45:52 PM GMT.

All of our Unix product offerings use 64-bit systems with a 64-bit time_t that can represent values from 0 to 263-1 (9,223,372,036,854,775,807 [9.2 quintillion] seconds, or about 292.27 billion years), which is about 21 times the estimated age of our universe!

For the curious: a hypothetical 128-bit time_t would yield a maximum of 2127-1 seconds (170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,727 [170 undecillion] seconds), or about 18.4 quintillion times as many as 64-bit systems.

For the really curious: a hypothetical 256-bit time_t would yield a maximum of 2255-1 seconds (57,896,044,618,658,097,711,785,492,504,343,953,926,634,992,332,820,282,019,728,792,003,956,564,819,967 [57 quattuorvigintillion] seconds), or about 340 undecillion times as many as 128-bit systems.

* For informational purposes only

As of Fri Jul 10 23:42:35 GMT 2026 there are currently:

  • 1,783,726,955 seconds since the UNIX epoch.
  • 11 years, 6 months, and 8 days until the overflow moment on 19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM GMT.

To check whether a Unix machine's clock is 2038-compliant, you can run this perl script to see if the time is incremented correctly. 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use POSIX qw(ctime tzset);

$ENV{'TZ'} = 'GMT';
tzset();

for my $clock (2147483641 .. 2147483650) {
    print ctime($clock);
}

Note that a passing test only shows that the operating system and perl handle dates past 2038. Even on a 64-bit system, individual applications can carry their own 2038 limits: the 32-bit counter lives on in some file formats, embedded devices, and notably in MySQL and MariaDB TIMESTAMP columns, which end at exactly 19 Jan 2038 — use DATETIME columns for dates beyond that.

Year:

Please keep in mind that the above only represents most UNIX operating systems; others may have their own date problems.

You can use this interface to view any yearly calendar from 1-9999.