Thursday, September 9, 1999

Travellers cancel flights over '9999'

ALEX LO and PETER CHAN

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Nervous travellers cancelled flight bookings and banks geared themselves for a run on ATM machines ahead of possible computer problems on today's Y2K danger day.

Financial regulators said they expected no problems, but tests will probably continue until tomorrow because institutions need to ensure computer records generated during the day are still running on September 10.

Potential problems arise because the sequence 9999 - today's date - is used in some old mainframe computers and outdated programming languages to indicate "end of file". A system that confuses the date as a command could crash, but most experts rate it as low-risk because such systems are rare in Hong Kong.

There were reports yesterday of travellers avoiding the date by cancelling flights.

"Two of my Taiwanese associates booked around the date to come in to Hong Kong a few days early," said computer multinational Adobe's general manager for the SAR and Taiwan, Howard Digby.

"A third cancelled his flight and re-booked. He hasn't come yet. Maybe people in Taiwan are a bit more cautious."

A woman, who declined to give her name, was scheduled to fly to London today but delayed her flight until Saturday to avoid the date.

However, Cathay Pacific and several travel agents said there had been no rush of cancellations for yesterday and today.

The Bank of China put in a monitoring system to resupply its 400 Jetco ATM machines if worried customers withdrew more cash than usual.

After requests from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, all banks started running "Y2K event management centres" as early as 6pm yesterday.

The banks tested systems operating 24 hours a day, including processing systems for treasury operations, automatic teller machines, credit cards, phone-banking and Internet banking.

Standard Chartered Bank group executive director Mervyn Davies said: "This is an excellent opportunity for us to test our systems in advance of the millennium." An HSBC spokesman said: "We are well prepared."

The Government started running its own co-ordinating centre at 10pm.

By early today, there had been no reports of problems.

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Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), September 09, 1999