The Computer Apocalypse That Never Was
An Explanation of the Y2k Incident
By: Kacey Joslin
New Year’s Eve is typically a time to celebrate the year’s achievements… or it’s an excuse to party with your friends. The ball drop is a quintessentially American tradition of counting down until midnight and kissing your partner or an unsuspecting passersby.
But you know what else is quintessentially American? Blowing things out of proportion.
In 1999, December 31 wasn’t just a nationwide celebration of the new millennium.
It was sheer pandemonium. The Y2K incident, or the Y2K bug, was a phenomenon that some of you may have lived through. Some of you may have panicked and built a bunker for your family because you thought the apocalypse was impending. Y2K means “Year 2000.” The “Y” stands for “year” and the “K” for “thousand.”
At the time, computers were considered top-notch, but by today’s standards, they were low quality. Computers had limited memory storage, so computer programmers were taking shortcuts and trying to save every megabyte. One of the shortcuts programmers made was abbreviating dates. The year 1998, for example, would be shortened to “98.”
There was a concern that when the end of the century came, the abbreviation of 2000 to “00” would cause computers around the world to crash. The double zero could mean “2000” or “1900,” or it could mean a nil value—that is, non-existent and unrecognizable.
It wasn’t only computers that would be affected. All technologies using computer chips would be at risk, including elevators, life-saving medical equipment, temperature control rooms for food, banking transactions, and the software used to schedule airline departure and satellites. Traffic lights. Power systems. Military software. Microwaves. The Internet.
You get the picture.
Theories of a computer apocalypse abounded and experts had no answers.
The panic began in the late 1990s when computers had only been mainstream for a decade or so. My father didn’t get a personal computer until 1992 and it didn’t have the Internet, just games and a typewriter program.
(My 20/20 hindsight glibly imagines that if computers had taken over the world in 2000, his old IBM wouldn’t have had the processing speed to compose a manifesto.)
In 1998, former president Bill Clinton passed a bill called the Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act. The bill encouraged computer companies to make public the plans they had in place to prepare for Y2K. The legislation would also protect companies from being sued if their plans didn’t work.
However, though companies and cities had tentative plans for Y2K, it didn’t stop people from panicking. Sensationalist media began to hype up Y2K as the end of time. Daytime television brought in “experts” who claimed the destruction of technology would bring with it the destruction of the economy, paper currency, international relations, etc.
City mayors issued warnings to the public regarding a flood of service interruptions. According to an archived article from October 31, 1999, New York prepared for 30,000 calls to emergency services being transferred incorrectly, traffic lights glitching and causing “massive gridlock,” elevator shutdowns, and blackouts across Times Square.
"We plan for the worst and hope for the best," was Deputy New York Police Commissioner Richard Sheirer’s response. New York residents were not satisfied.
Here’s a hypothetical apocalypse scenario. Imagine you’re a city mayor and you’ve spent millions of dollars getting your city’s automated water systems up to “Y2K compliance” (as it was called), but what are your residents doing?
They’re preparing themselves for the apocalypse. The media has told them to stock up on water, so they’re filling their bathtubs up for drinking, bathing, and other survival purposes. Imagine, however, that all of them are doing this at the same time. The water supply is killed, so when people go to turn on their faucet... there’s no water. That leads to even more panic, taking to the streets, causing a riot, mayhem on a nationwide scale.
These were the fears that circled the minds of Y2K bloggers and fearmongers.
Thankfully, this never happened.
But it could have happened, and that fear was what numerous companies were capitalizing on. Survival kits were sold, including two-in-one flashlight radios. Giant tankards of soup were on sale, as well as dehydrated food and seeds to grow in your survival bunker/farm. There were Y2K expos at your local supermarket, jokingly selling hats with digital clocks that counted down to January 1.
Americans spent $100 billion dollars to fix the bug and update computers and programs to be compliant for Y2K. Global Y2K-readiness cost between $300 billion and $500 billion. But when the New Years arrived, well—
Nothing apocalyptic happened.
My dad, who thought it was a hoax at the time, went to bed early on New Year’s Eve.
Come January 1, the consequences of Y2K were relatively minor. Incorrect risk assessments for Down Syndrome were released to expecting parents in the United Kingdom, resulting in two abortions. In Japan, radiation-monitoring equipment and nuclear power plant alarms malfunctioned. Bus ticket machines in Australia were briefly inoperable, while websites such as AT&T in America displayed the date as January 1, 1900.
As technology expands and artificial intelligence becomes mainstream, it’s likely that we’ll have another computer apocalypse scare on the horizon; on the bright side, there might be leftover survival kits and uneaten dehydrated fruit from Y2K to get us through the next decade!