What was worst case scenario if we hadn’t addressed Y2K?
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A bunch of software controlling really important things like the banking system would have bugged out and caused a ton of problems. It likely would have resulted in huge re-engineering costs (bigger than the pre-re-engineering that happened) and people would have had to deal with service outages and interruptions in lots of things.
I am sure I lack imagination here. But you have no idea just how many banks were processing documents with two digit years for the transaction date field. It was not just between the banks but also between different departments, for the storage and archive, within different computer systems and even within each application. A failure in one of these systems would not be a big deal, part of a bank would be out of order. So no new loans, bank transfers, or brokering for a few days depending on what system was affected. They might have processed a lot of it manually or blindly just to get by. When the systems got up the stockpile of work would have been processed over the weekend and everything back to normal.
However if there had been multiple of these failures at once. Taking out several systems in the same bank. And this happening in every bank and financial institution. You would imagine that the financial world would just stop for a few days as the problems were fixed. However when you have an issue with a single system you can often commit more resources to fix it. All the developers at the bank start looking at the same problem. You get outside consultants or people from the vendor involved. Others in the bank would start working processing things manually or redirecting customers to other alternatives. But when you have multiple systems down you simply run out of resources to handle them all. Saying that a system will be up in a few days only works as long as you have people working on trying to fix it. If everyone is working on something else it would not get fixed. Adding to this when you have multiple systems down it is very hard to find the problem because there are so many places to look, and when you find something wrong you do not know if it is because of a problem in the software or if a related system is having problems. You even have a lot of systems not being used because of all the problems and they too might have similar issues.
So if people had not spent the better half of a decade trying to fix the Y2K bug in the financial systems the entire world financial market could have been down for months. And this would have stopped businesses from taking up loans, doing business transactions, etc. You would have people not working because they do not know what to work on or if they are going to get paid. It would result in a massive loss of income for lots of companies who would then end up bankrupt. It would be a massive financial crash.
A bunch of really old (by computer standards) banking and insurance software would have mistaken the current date as Jan 1, 1900 on 2000.
Depending on how the software was written we could have seen things as innocuous as statements sent out with the wrong date.
Or customers getting charged 100 years of interest on their houses, or getting a cheque of the reverse. Or not taking any payments at all because the mortgage hadn’t started yet on paper.
Insurance companies might have marked a bunch of people as dead, or not born yet.
Payroll systems, Employment Insurance, and other government systems might have malfunctioned similarly.
Software running things like Power plants might have crashed or malfunctioned requiring manual intervention.
Individual problems like this might have crippled the banking system for a few days or weeks.
But a cascade of failures, multiple similar problems compounding each other would have been a disaster
It was really a problem for older systems: banks, perhaps your power company, government agencies, or really any other system that was set up from the 1960s to, say, the late 1980s. Anything built after that would have had Y2K already accounted for.
So the worst possible scenario? Bank systems fail and you can’t perform transactions until they figure something out. Government agencies might not be able to process requests that depend on old systems. Some people might lose power.
I worked on payroll software, converting 2 digit years to 4 digits years in the late 90s. For some companies there are factors in their payroll determined by length of employment (PTO days, retirement contributions, etc.). Those calculations would have resulted in a negative number (hired in 1998 but now running payroll in 2000, so 00 – 98 = -98 years of employment. Whoops. It probably would have just crashed the whole payroll run at that point, or at best resulted in some really messed up calculations that would have also resulted in a delayed payroll anyway.
So in that specific case, a good amount of people would not have been paid on time. For some people, getting paid on time could be very critical. It could also put the employers at risk for labor law violations, and in turn the payroll software company could have been sued into oblivion.
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I’m sure you could find lots of examples of specific bugs in specific products that were avoided due to adequate Y2K preparation, but as a whole there is no central register of every issue or much research into what the cascading side-effects could have been. A such there isn’t really any way to determine what the worse case scenario would have been. Very vaguely there was the possible threat of broken financial systems and whole economies.
I mean part of the problem was that a lot of companies didn’t really know what if any of their software would be impacted by Y2K, or what the consequences would have been for them. I’m sure lots of companies spent tonnes on auditing their code only to find no bugs, or only minor cosmetic issues.
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