What was worst case scenario if we hadn’t addressed Y2K?
In: 9
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
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