Leap Day Glitch: New Zealand Gas Pumps Fail on February 29

It resembles the Y2K bug, but exclusively with regard to gas station pumps. and only in New Zealand.

TFD – Dive into the peculiar world of gas station mishaps as New Zealand faces a Leap Day glitch. Explore the impact with TheFoxDaily.

Yesterday was Leap Day, meaning that for the first time in four years, it was February 29. That’s normally a quirky, astronomical factoid (or a very special birthday for some). But that unique calendar date broke gas station payment systems across New Zealand for much of the day.

As reported by numerous international outlets, self-serve pumps in New Zealand were unable to accept card payments due to a problem with the gas pumps’ payment processing software. The New Zealand Herald reported that the outage lasted “more than 10 hours.” As a result, some gas stations were forced to close, and others were forced to accept payments in-store. The outage affected suppliers including Allied Petroleum, BP, Gull, Waitomo, and Z Energy. It has now reportedly been fixed.

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According to reports, internal payment methods including the Waitomo app and BP gasoline cards continued to function throughout the outage.

Because of its position, New Zealand is among the first nations to experience February 29 every four years, as reported by Bloomberg. Stakeholders were driven crazy by the gas pump malfunction, frantically trying to figure out how to fix the issue that resulted from the software’s inability to handle the bonus day.

Invenco Group, the company that made the malfunctioning self-payment terminals, revealed to Reuters that the issue was caused by a “leap year glitch” through its CEO, John Scott. According to Scott, the issue solely applied to New Zealand code. Invenco is looking into the glitch’s cause in order to learn more.

Invenco collaborated with Worldline during the rollout of the fix, Scott further disclosed to The New Zealand Herald. Worldline, based in France, develops software for handling credit card transactions. According to the Otago Daily Times, Worldline stated that all non-Invenco terminals that used their technology carried on operating throughout the interruption.

The outage serves as a stark reminder of how dependent society has grown on technology and how easily entire enterprises and people’s days may be turned upside down by a mistake based on something as small as a calendar date. Gas stations that relied on the malfunctioning machines lost out on sales, even though some were still able to take other payment methods. According to RNZ, they spoke with someone who was turned away from four gas stations because of the outage.

The goal is that the size and humiliation of the outage will help prevent such incidents, as the companies involved attempt to apologize and offer discounts in some cases in order to make up for the inconvenience.

A representative for Allied Petroleum, when prompted via Facebook to “maybe remember Leap Day in four years’ time,” responded: “We’ll add it to our Outlook reminders 😕”.

Ars Technica was the original home of this story.