A number of New Zealand petrol pumps stopped working on Thursday due to a “leap year glitch” in payment software, fuel stations and the payment service provider said.
International: ‘Leap year glitch’ shuts some New Zealand fuel pumps. Allied Fuel, Gull, Z Energy and BP all confirmed some self-service fuel pumps they operate around New Zealand were not working due to issues with the payment system used.
John Scott, chief executive of Invenco Group, which provides the payment software solution, said the system had stopped working due to a “leap year glitch”.
This was now fixed and just needed to be rolled out to affected fuel pumps around the country, Scott said.
Once every four years, there is an extra day in February creating what is known as a leap year. New Zealand is one of the first countries in the world to experience a new day and so experiences a leap day first.
Scott said this was just an issue with the New Zealand code, and while Invenco was unsure how it had happened, it would investigate the glitch over the coming days.
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A leap year (also known as an intercalary year or bissextile year) is a calendar year that contains an additional day (or, in the case of a lunisolar calendar, a month) compared to a common year. The 366th day (or 13th month) is added to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical year or seasonal year. Since astronomical events and seasons do not repeat in a whole number of days, calendars having a constant number of days each year will unavoidably drift over time with respect to the event that the year is supposed to track, such as seasons. By inserting (“intercalating”) an additional day—a leap day—or month—a leap month—into some years, the drift between a civilization’s dating system and the physical properties of the Solar System can be corrected.
An astronomical year lasts slightly less than 3651/4 days. The historic Julian calendar has three common years of 365 days followed by a leap year of 366 days, by extending February to 29 days rather than the common 28. The Gregorian calendar, the world’s most widely used civil calendar, makes a further adjustment for the small error in the Julian algorithm. Each leap year has 366 days instead of 365. This extra leap day occurs in each year that is a multiple of 4, except for years evenly divisible by 100 but not by 400.
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