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
People who thought planes would just fall out of the sky at exactly midnight on New Years were paranoid.
People who thought there would be hundreds of bugs that would have popped up starting in the years leading up to 2000 and even in the years following it? Very justified.
For a comparison, think about the Crowdstrike outage that happened back in July. It caused entire industries to shut down. But that is very different, because it was an immediate outage. The thing with Y2K is that the bugs it caused might not necessarily cause immediate system outages, but instead result in incorrect data. Systems could still be up and running for a long time, compounding the effect of bad data over and over and over.
Something like an airline scheduler that has to handle where planes and pilots are going to be could be full of errors, and it could take a long time to get everything working right again. A banking application could make compounding errors on interest payouts. These kinds of bugs could go on for weeks and weeks, and rewinding to the data before the bug happened and then replaying all the logic going forward could be impossible. So much could have happened based off that bad data that it is a mess to clean up.
The bugs also didn’t necessarily have to happen at exactly midnight on New Years, they just had to involve calculations that went beyond New Years. So you didn’t know when they were happening until it was too late. Every software vendor had to painstakingly review everything to make sure they were safe. Additionally, software deployment was kind of different in that era. Automated installs largely didn’t exist. You might not even be getting your software via downloads, but instead installing it off of discs. That means all these fixes had to be done well ahead of time to be able to print and ship them.
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