Excerpt from story on VNUNET:

Ikea store cards fail Year 2000 test

Ikea has been bitten by the millennium bug, forcing its store card customers to endure another two weeks of payment problems at tills in UK stores. The store card of the Swedish home furnishing giant is not being accepted by computer systems because of a Year 2000 problem, causing card transactions to be wrongly rejected for over-shooting the expiry date 12/99.

Ikea has admitted that the problem will not be resolved until the end of this month.

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), January 18, 2000

Answers

http://www.vnu.co.uk/News/105399

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), January 18, 2000.

Technically, this is not a Y2K problem. But, it is a "side effect" of Y2K limitations from 1994:

[snip]

Jens Rom, managing director for Ikea's card programme in the UK, claimed that he had received only one complaint about the cards and that the problem was not the Y2K bug, it was just "millennium- related".

Rom said Ikea cards are not embossed with an expiry date because every card transaction is authorised online. However, at the time of the card's launch in 1994, software in the tills required an expiry date for cards to be accepted and 12/99 was coded on the magnetic strip in every card.

"If it hadn't been for Y2K, we could have put a much later date in, but our account system would not accept dates beyond Y2K," he admitted.

[snip]

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), January 18, 2000.

Holy Cow! Ikea cards in UK fail! Won't be fixed for two weeks! This is terrible! It's the Beginning of the End!

-- abc (a@b.c), January 18, 2000.