I was born in 2000. I’ve always heard that Y2K was just dramatics and paranoia, but I’ve also read that it was justified and it was handled by endless hours of fixing the programming. So, which is it? Was it people being paranoid for no reason, or was there some justification for their paranoia? Would the world really have collapsed if they didn’t fix it?
In: Technology
Yes it was, but the paranoia got out of control due to the media coverage.
Keep in mind that in 1999 personal computers were common and the internet existed, but they were nowhere near as common or understood as they are now. Smartphones didn’t exist either. So while a lot of businesses were computerized the average person was less likely to understand how a computer worked and therefore could panic about it.
Y2K could have been really bad but only if companies hadn’t addressed it. If the software hadn’t been fixed bank statements, utility bills, insurance companies, etc could have had serious problem on Jan 1, 2000.
But it’s not like the problem was only discovered with 6 months to go… it was well understood that it would be a problem for well over a decade.
IT people had spent a decade getting software and hardware upgraded to get rid of the Y2K bug, and companies spent tons of time in ’98 + ’99 testing everything to make sure there wasn’t a problem.
By the time Dec 31, 1999 came around just about all the bugs had been worked out but the media had blown it up so much that everyone was very panicky about it.
People refused to fly, some people bought up supplies and food in case they couldn’t buy anything Jan 1, people were powering down their houses to avoid surges, it was nuts.
My former boss was working at a bank during Y2K and they spent New Years Eve in the server room eating Chinese food and monitoring all the banking software in case something exploded… it didn’t.
In the end nothing of consequence happened.
The craziest thing was what happened to Canada’s Space Channel.
On New Years at midnight they started a fake news broadcast about how Y2K had destroyed the world. Reporting the power grid was collapsing, planes were falling out of the air. There was a man on fire walking in the background. It was hilarious. They ended the segment with the text ‘In the spirit of War of the Worlds’
Latest Answers