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
It was a problem, but not the existential problem
It was framed as. Planes were never going to fall out of the sky (not sure how a computer glitch was going to nullify the laws of aerodynamics, but people actually believed it). Cars were never going to stop running. Bank accounts were never going to be reset to zero because the computer “thought” we had gone back in time to
1900. But it could have caused lots of smaller hassles and headaches, and the cumulative effect of those could have been expensive and difficult to fix after the fact.
A little of both.
People with a working knowledge of computers and electronics knew there would be some issues, but those would mostly be related to bookkeeping, interest calculations, and long-term records.
But since fewer people in 1999/2000 had competent working knowledge of computers, there were lots of reports/rumors flying around that cars would stop working, airplanes would fall out of the sky, and power plants would shut down.
When people tried to point out that cars didn’t have computers in them, airplane computers didn’t care about or use dates, and powerplants had backup features, the response was largely “Yea, but how can we be SURE?”
Y2K was an issue, and a lot of people spent a lot of time getting in front of it and minimizing the confusion.
But there was never any risk of global catastrophe.
Well, kinda. Turns out just turning everything off at midnight on New Year’s solved it. The PSAs and everything were taken way out of proportion. Yes, it could be bad, catastrophic even, but the solution is also so simple.
People do die from software bugs, but this issue was well publicized, well understood and had an exact due date so we figured it out in time.
If you hear about a thing engineers/programmers/scientists flip out about widescale for real and then nothing happens, it is usually because people worked their asses off to make sure things get fixed.
Examples:
Acid rain: was a big deal. It still is, but WAY less so because regulations were done. Basically airborne polutants would get mixed in the sky with rain and would have more acidity, damaging structures and crops over time.
Y2K: was a big deal. Remember recently when airlines, banks, some HOSPITALS, etc. went down because of a bad update that wasn’t vetted right? Well think that, but larger scale and harder to fix if we tried to do it after the fact. Computers wouldn’t have been able to correctly do their job and even in 2000 that would’ve had negative impacts that would’ve caused cascading issues (supply, travel, medical) for a good while. We wanted to avoid that so people worked hard to do so.
Ozone layer: CFCs were destroying the ozone layer. The ozone layer is helpful by being protective. We need it but we were breaking it. CFCs however were super useful, so they were everywhere. By “panicking” and actually acting somewhat fast, regulations got put into place to ban/regulate CFCs. You could even look on your hairspray/etc. to see if that no-CFCs label was there!
There are a couple of upcoming software “bugs” like the Y2K one that people are working on fixing now!
Did the media overhype any of these? I think occasionally tv did them a disservice (like the King of the Hill episode. Nothing happened because people made sure nothing happened!) but people going out and panicking is…..apparently what people like to do. Ex: Y2K, everyone went and bought all the tp. COVID-19 made people go and buy all the tp. Port dock worker strike, everyone went and bought all the tp.
I worked in a team developing large software products. We developed tools to run through every line of code looking for dates and rolled out a patch for the very few jnstances where we found two digit years. And then the whole team gave up New Year to be on hand if there were any calls. There weren’t, and we all had pizza.
I was working in IT support and software development at the time. It was 99.8% unjustified paranoiia.
The “Year 2000 problem” was *definitely* not a surprise, systems engineers are very forward-thinking, smart folks and realized this would be an issue many years prior and had already upgraded their hardware to support 4-digit dates. As for software, operating sytems like Windows and Unix had also been patched by at least 1998 or so. There was absolutely no reason to think a PC made in the last 5-8 years would just “break” or “reset” or “freeze” when the clock turned over on Dec 31, 1999.
There were exceptions of course. But nothing critical. We’re talking issues that would have affected no more than a handful of businesses using some super-niche software that never got updated, or their own home-brewed stuff.
It was a big problem. I have worked in Industrial automation and we had to update systems. Some of them quite old. Those systems are not connected to Internet and the production facility they are automating is not changing, so sometimes you can see quite old control systems still in use. Some of my coworkers even had to be at work on New Years eave, but there was no emergency. We have done our homework well and the systems were ready to roll over.
It is no small thing when something goes wrong with an automation system for production of steel and you have many tons of molten steel that is cooling down and you need to restart the production line or conticaster or whatever system. One coil from a hot rolling mill sells for 50k Euro and they are produced every 90 seconds. How much money is lost when there is 90 minutes un-planned outage?
I have also helped a small company to overhaul their information system for collection of production data to a year 2000. The system was designed well, with 4 digits for year, but somebody very clever at the company thought many years before 2000 that they will save a bit of time when they start entering year in two digits – 89 instead of 1989. So when 2000 rolled over, the records for new production were at the bottom of the list, well below dates beginning with 8x and 9x. You can’t simply replace dates in all tables at once to the correct value, because tables in a database are in “relations” so the database will not allow you to, for example, delete a client when there are jobs associated with his ID, because those records would be “orphaned”. So it was a complicated process that had to . Even if it was basically just replacing 99 with 1999, 98 with 1998 … . You have to backup everything first, so they do not lose more than a decade of production records when you screw something up.
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’
Hundreds of thousands of hours of mitigation. We got there. We won this one. D’ya think we’ll win 2038?
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