Part 2/9:
The core of this concern revolves around how many legacy systems keep track of time. Many older digital devices, including critical infrastructure like hospitals, banking systems, transportation, and embedded devices like routers and industrial machinery, rely on a method of timekeeping that counts seconds since January 1, 1970—a standard known as the Unix epoch.
However, these systems often use 32-bit integers to store this time, which imposes a maximum limit. Specifically, a 32-bit signed integer can represent values up to 2,147,483,647 seconds. When this "maxed out" occurs at exactly 3:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038, the counter will overflow and reset to a negative number, causing the system to interpret the date as December 1901—or worse, to malfunction entirely.