Why didn’t Y2K problem end the world?
In: Engineering
Because a lot of work was done to check and fix lots of software.
The risk of a serious problem was always low, but not impossible, so every reasonable means had to be taken to prevent something going wrong, otherwise companies could have lost billions in compensation claims.
In truth it brought forward investment in new solutions by a few years and made some consulting firms and contractors lots of money.
There was more potential for banking payments to be rejected due to bad dates rather than planes to fall out of the sky (in my opinion) but they landed all the planes overnight just in case.
Where I worked we had one system failure after Y2K that was due to the date programming: at the end of February the payroll went from 28 Feb 2000 to 1 March 2000. We waited a day and reset the clock. (Leap Years are divisible by 400). People had already had their February pay and we did a manual adjustment.
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