ATM’s ‘dying technology’ problem may hit data centres as engineers ‘disappear’

COBOL may be decades old, but it still powers critical financial infrastructure and 95% of ATM transactions, according to IBM. Now, as the engineers who maintain these systems age out and fewer young developers learn the language, the skills needed to keep this infrastructure running could become scarce.This could also create problems for data centers supporting financial services, where legacy systems still run on COBOL. Banks and businesses may struggle to maintain systems they can't easily replace, and the shortage of skilled engineers has existed for years. It will only get worse as experienced COBOL programmers retire.COBOL is running out of peopleCOBOL was never designed to become such a deeply embedded part of modern infrastructure. Yet 66 years after its creation, financial institutions, businesses, and governments still use it widely.The language has evolved over time. COBOL introduced object-oriented programming in 2002, while IBM has continued developing products around it.