Console: "Month 13 is out of bounds"

Question

Level 1

11 points

Console: "Month 13 is out of bounds"

In the process of trying to figure out why my iMac shut down, I saw, in Console, a ton of entries, from many processes, that say "Month 13 is out of bounds." I'm not sure where my Mac got the idea it was in a month 13, but clearly it did, and a lot of tasks are having trouble with that.

Has anyone else seen this? I wonder if it's some kind of bug that got introduced.

IMAC (RETINA 5K, 27-INCH, LATE 2015), macOS Sierra (10.12.6), 3.2 GHz i5, 16GB RAM, 1TB Fusion Dr

Posted on Dec 3, 2017 7:15 AM

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Answer 1

Tgray

Level 1

18 points

Dec 3, 2017 9:35 AM in response to djhalnon

I think it is more widespread than people realize. I think it is causing me and others performance issues. Well, the "Month 13" warning is a symptom of an underlying issues, which is causing the performance issues. But if you get them, they are bad.

See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8184421.

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Answer 2

macjack

Level 10

111,168 points

Dec 3, 2017 7:24 AM in response to djhalnon

I haven't seen this but have you reset the date and is it working a expected now?

If not you can reset the date in Terminal with this command:

At the prompt copy & paste:

sudo date 120306052017

The format is MM/dd/hh/mm/yyyy

You will need to adjust the hh and mm (hour and minute) to the correct time

Press Return

You will get a brief lecture about sudo and it will ask for your Admin password. The password will be invisible.

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Answer 3

djhalnon Author

Level 1

11 points

Dec 3, 2017 8:27 AM in response to macjack

OK, first of all, the date on my Mac is not wrong. It's 12/3/2017, which is correct where I am.

Second, the date isn't actually a MDY value. It's a single number which is rendered into a MDY value by the operating system. Unless there's a bug in the OS, there's no value for this number which can possibly produce a "month 13," because the lookup process ought to be incapable of doing so.

There's a reason I suspect an OS bug. What I want to know is how widespread this problem is.

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Answer 4

Dec 4, 2017 9:12 AM in response to Tgray

Tgray wrote:

I think it is more widespread than people realize....

It is occurring on all four of my Macs each of which has totally different

apps installed and serve totally different purposes. Actually, one is a MacMini

being used as a home server and only has Server and iTunes running and only

Apple apps on the machine.

I am not having the severe issues that others are having but the errors are popping

up in Console pretty regularly.

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Answer 5

djhalnon Author

Level 1

11 points

Dec 4, 2017 2:47 PM in response to Tgray

Yeah, since I posted this question I've found references to this bug all over the Internet. Seems it can be "fixed" only by dating the Mac back to before 12/1/2017 and pegging it there by turning off automatic time updates. That, of course, is idiotic, as the Mac will be out-of-date, and will grow further out of date as Dec. 2017 goes on.

I ended up calling Apple T/S. They said my Mac had a possible hardware problem, I should run diagnostics (I did, and it found nothing wrong) and reset the SMC controller (I did that too, and it caused another issue with my magic trackpad not connecting, which in turn triggered another T/S call in order to get it working again).

Apple's refusal to acknowledge this bug is inexcusable. The crap about possible hardware failure was a joke, and a waste of my time ... not to mention requiring a second T/S call to straighten out a B/T connection issue that need never have failed in the first place.

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Answer 6

Tgray

Level 1

18 points

Dec 4, 2017 3:01 PM in response to djhalnon

Fixed my UserEventAgent issues. There was a launchd job scheduled via a plist in Library/LaunchAgents that used the StartCalendarInterval key. Removing that caused UserEventAgent to settle down. Still getting the console messages but I can ignore them until Apple realizes they have a bug and can figure out how to do date math properly.

A call with Apple was schedule for me after I reached out to them through twitter, but it was totally pointless. The level of tech support I got was not high enough to deal with an issue like this.

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Answer 7

Dec 5, 2017 8:49 AM in response to djhalnon

This also has nothing to do with any 3rd party stuff either as

I have found (as others have) that the error continues to occur

when in Safe Mode when all 3rd party stuff is disabled!

Even those (like me) that are not experiencing operational issues,

the error will still occur. Just watch and you will see it pop up,

including in Safe Mode.

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Answer 8

djhalnon Author

Level 1

11 points

Dec 5, 2017 5:36 PM in response to Hui_Cheng

No. There is no fix. Apple refuses to acknowledge the problem. You can date your computer to some time before 12/1/2017 and prevent the time from updating, but that isn't a fix, it's a workaround (and a terrible one, at that).

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