Hmm, who was this clueless manager who decided to do such things in the 1-th of January. I guess the programmers over the world will be very busy during january looking for the hidden Y2K bugs and fixing it, and why RADB decided to add some more troubles just in this days? Why don't wait until, at least, February? What terrible happen if this changes will be delayed a little?
One way or another, the old routing description language will stop working at the end of this century. The syntax doesn't include four-digit years or a rollover of two digit years. Merit could terminate support sooner, but they can't really extend it. Although there have been several announcements about the end of life for ripe-181, and everyone should have switched by now, I'm sure someone will not update their procedures until after it breaks. Should Merit have "broken" them on December 1 instead of January 1? I don't know. I guess it goes under the saying, no good deed goes unpunished. Hopefully most of those users broke already when Merit changed the default on the servers, and have used the last couple of months to update their procedures. Of course those networks which have never used a routing database will say, Nah, Nah, I told you so.