Numeric limits like this are far more common than you might think. Besides the well known Y2K mitigation, there were some problems on day 10,000 when four char

Numeric limits like this are far more common than you might think. Besides the well known Y2K mitigation, there were some problems on day 10,000 when four characters to represent days since the epoch overflowed, mid 90s for Unix derived systems and I believe VMS as well. None were civilization threatening. We also had Second One Billion in early 2000s. Also no public catastrophes. Next big one is 2038, when 32-bit Unix timekeeping overflows.