JOHN THE OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
© 2005
Effecto 2000: The Y2K Bug Really Did
Almost Destroy the World
Children born in the year 2000 are now in kindergarten. I’m sure that as they grow up and learn about the nicely rounded year of their births, most of them will be told the Y2K bug that briefly colored that year was a myth, a hoax and/or an exaggeration.
Kids, don’t trust anyone born before the Internet.
Because the Y2K bug was very real and very dangerous. Untreated, it would certainly have crashed American and international business and killed lots of people. Treated, it still caused scores of problems that went underreported and were quickly forgotten.
Denying it is like saying the last major California earthquake was no big deal because it didn’t kill 5,000 people, ignoring the years of building code and construction technique changes it took to ameliorate the problem—and also ignoring the handful of people who died anyway.
This column was born out of five years of frustration at hearing people downplay or laugh at the Y2K bug. But the really amazing legacy of the Y2K bug is silence. It’s virtually a forgotten subject now. Google it and your top hits are fossil links. A recent article on Wired.com, a geek ashram, about the 10 worst computer bugs of all time didn’t even mention it.1 In the ultimate insult, it’s gone down the memory hole like a forgotten war or a faddish toy.
How could something world-shaking be so easily dismissed—even forgotten? It was thanks to a complex nexus of cultural attitudes, some of which are virtually unimaginable in today’s climate.
One was utter computer illiteracy. In 2000, even most middle-class people still weren’t online. They had no personal context or perspective on what the Y2K bug meant. Descriptions of the problem sounded simultaneously trivial and opaque: put most crudely, the 1960s-’80s practice of coding years into calendar-sensitive software by only the last two digits, resulting in 2000 being read as 1900 and causing crashes or misdating.2
The only context for the average person was their personal computer at work or home; even more then than now, it was viewed as a black box with mysterious inner workings. The Y2K bug didn’t affect most people’s personal computers; there wasn’t much to affect in any case, and what problems there were could be easily patched at the last minute. This further trivialized the problem for most people; they didn’t realize that a lot of those quick fixes were due to debugging software developed by the massive Y2K immunization effort.
The main groups proactively concerned about the Y2K bug were computer geeks and fundamentalist Christian survivalists—two despised subcultures the mainstream enjoys laughing at.
The Y2K bug was also eventually overhyped, but the mainstream public had no way of gauging when requisite hype ended and overhype began. Dire warnings issued by authorities from the federal government on down were certainly necessary to spur action to fix the bug. But they continued after major repair programs were developed. And some of the hysteria was certainly created for financial reasons by programmers and consultants who made big money debugging things—the one truth the public was quick to suss out. Anything less than total global destruction would be considered a letdown after that hype, and was by the mainstream.
(Other countries such as
Spain—where the problem was known as “Effecto
2000”—did much less repair work and reported fewer problems, leading many of
them to call Y2K a money-making fraud hatched by Bill Gates or some other
archfiend. The quality of the criticism reflects the quality of their
comprehension of software, which in turn reflects their relative lack of
computerization at the time; fewer problems in
There was also millennial anxiety tied into all of it, an end-of-the-world mentality (or desire, certainly in my case) that folded neatly into Y2K for many people, religious or secular. That anxiety was obviously irrational, but somehow saying so became a dismissal of the Y2K bug, too. And for those who did prepare for—even anticipate—disaster, the eventual perception dovetailed with that of the mainstream: it was a letdown, a non-event.
At the same
time, in the Gilded Age of the Clintonian,
SUV-inventing, dot-com bubbling, “Titanic”-sinking 1990s, mainstream
The press was no help, either, providing thin, scattered, sensationalist coverage that pre-Jan. 1, 2000 flirted with apocalypticism, then settled into a New Year of triumphalism, perfectly matching the national mood. “Computers Prevail in First Hours of ’00,” said a story on the front page of the Jan. 1 New York Times, in a headline that sounded dazzlingly positive while being literally meaningless. (Wouldn’t computers have prevailed either way?)
That headline also encapsulates the misunderstanding that midnight, Jan. 1 was the problem time; in fact, Y2K bug problems were expected to (and did) unreel over days, weeks, months and even years that followed as various programs churned away at their appointed hours, which in most cases was not midnight on a Saturday.
A final influence is that an even bigger concern than the bug itself was the legal liability for it. Private businesses were especially hit with Y2K problems, and naturally kept a lot of them secret to this day. The Gartner Group, a consulting firm that tackled Y2K bug problems, received about 400 confidential reports of problems in private companies by Jan. 4, according to the Times.
“There were some things that were critical that popped up months or years later, but you just fixed it,” I was told by an employee at a large financial-sector company whose tenure included Y2K and a massive internal debugging regimen. Those lingering problems included programs crashing or throwing up error messages—fixed easily enough when the employee would be called in to do so after-hours, but that would have been debilitating without the overall debugging years before.
“I’m sure if I poked around now I could find things that said it was 1905. It’s just not stuff that’s in reports,” said the employee. “I don’t really have anything dramatic. I certainly heard rumors that there were places…that had more serious problems that were caught.”
“If there hadn’t
been a massive effort [to fix the Y2K bug]…large segments of the economy and
infrastructure would have stopped,” the employee said. “It wouldn’t have been
the whole ‘at the stroke of
Lingering glitches—that has been the pale ghost of the Y2K bug, and part of what made it so easy to dismiss. Somehow we forgot that enough glitches equals a disaster; after all, the Y2K bug was not a problem with one brand of software, but rather a critical mass of glitches in all software written before a certain era. “‘Critical’ is obviously relative,” the financial-sector employee reminded me.
Let’s return to our national paper of record, which eagerly brushed aside “minor glitches” in that Jan. 1 issue. One of those “minor glitches” was the failure of a “monitoring system” at a Japanese nuclear power plant.
Is there
such a thing as a minor glitch at a nuke plant? In fact, as the Times later
reported, there were Y2K bug “glitches” at an unspecified number of other nuke
plants in
We’re told
none of the glitches were safety-related; those at
Obviously, none of the reactors melted down or released radioactive steam. But what if the Y2K debugging hadn’t happened at all? (Remember, there was no guarantee that debugging programs caught everything at the time.)
Or what if
there had been more “glitches” like the one that caused windshear
alert systems at airports in Chicago (O’Hare), Tampa, Denver, Orlando and St.
Louis to display error messages? Windshear is a major
cause of plane crashes. We’re told the systems were fixed “within two hours.”
We’re also told there were similar problems, no duration given, at airports in
Meanwhile,
computers at airports in
If SimCity-style disaster doesn’t spook you, how about problems with security? A military spy satellite was “blinded” for at least two to three hours, and then operated for a couple days “at a reduced level,” after a ground station that made its transmissions legible crashed.
Meanwhile,
the power went out at Diego Garcia, a British atoll in the
A field office for what was then called the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) had an unspecified problem with its security system that required guards to be posted outside. The ATF refused to identify the office.
And an
unnamed building in
Remember, this was after years of Y2K debugging. What if 25 bases had gone dark instead of one? What if all the spy satellites had been blinded? What if doors were unlocked around the country?
A Swedish company’s kidney dialysis equipment failed to go through its automatic cleaning cycle due to a Y2K bug. That was caught and reportedly caused no human harm. But what if the problem had been multiplied a thousand-fold in the medical field?
It’s amusing to read about a video store computer charging a customer a $91,250 late fee for a 100-year-late rental, or an unnamed company’s delivery software starting to generate phantom orders that were caught prior to automatic shipping. Of course, it’s not amusing if those were your companies. Imagine if those sorts of things had happened to even 25 percent of US businesses.
The cutest
stories were about dated forms that popped out reading “1900”—a New Year’s
party favor rather than a disaster. But how funny is it that arraignments were
delayed in
Unidentified “stock exchanges and other trading support organizations” reported computers misdating forms and even miscalculating mutual funds assets. How cute would that have been on a larger, out-of-control scale?
The same could be said for the other glitches reported in the Times: ticketing machines jamming on public transit in Sydney and Adelaide, Australia; “timing devices” and internal clocks going haywire at various, largely unnamed, power utilities; a tide gauge in Portsmouth, England failing; Sweden’s SkandiaBanken online banking crashing; Greek cash registers malfunctioning; WordPerfect’s word processor failing to delete files; Web pages and a reading service for blind people giving wrong dates; untold numbers of small-business computers crashing.
The very existence of these relatively modest glitches somehow turned into proof that the bug didn’t exist.
And then, with the passage of time, the equation was inverted; the Y2K bug was nothing, so there were no problems at all. I’ve met people who literally remember it that way.
It must be said that the Times was truthful enough at the time. It editorialized on Jan. 3 about the real threat the Y2K bug had posed and the success of the fix. A similar point was made in the Jan. 1 news coverage—albeit about 20 paragraphs in and on the jump page.
But the form and style of the paper of record’s coverage belied the rationality. The Jan. 1 coverage emphasized the funny/trivial glitches in a way that essentially downplayed the entire problem rather than explaining the magnitude of the success in fixing it.
Over the next few days, coverage of Y2K bug problems was scattered throughout several articles or columns in the same issues rather than concentrated and analyzed, watering it down all the more.3
By Jan. 5, coverage was essentially over as the nation turned its attention to something it really enjoyed worrying about—Cuban waif Elián González.
What’s really intriguing is the similarities to the paper’s coverage of millennium celebration terrorist plots, another significant fear at the time.
There were no terrorist attacks, resulting in similar triumphalist, “what, me worry?” type coverage—another millennial mirage, it was dubbed. Then there were a few stories about curious arrests and property seizures—explosives, men with Muslim extremist connections. As we now know, there were major terrorist attacks planned for several locations on Jan. 1 that were foiled by police.
I can’t blame anyone for remembering Sept. 11 forever, but it was the anti-Y2K bug—a well-exploited series of airline security glitches that could have been repaired easily with fixes suggested dozens of times decades ago, but wasn’t. The Y2K bug could have easily matched the Sept. 11 death toll, but didn’t. Shouldn’t that be a cause for rejoicing, not derision or dismissal, as a letter-writer to the Times pointed out in early 2000?
After all, the Y2K bug’s effects aren’t over—and I don’t just mean those lurking glitches. One reason it is unthinkable as a problem today is because of the massive infrastructure upgrades the debugging sparked. Incredible as it seems, in the 1990s many major companies were still running systems with Radio Shack computers speaking Old FORTRAN. The Y2K bug forced the world into something close to 21st century technology.
If you think that’s not a big deal,
here’s a little story about Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) computer
systems. At
Then on Jan. 4, an FAA computer in
And on Jan. 7, an FAA system in
At first, these problems were considered possibly Y2K bug-related, but supposedly proved not to be. (I allow for liability-avoidance and good PR here.) Instead, they were age-related crashes in FAA systems dating to the 1960s that had not been upgraded and replaced as a result of Y2K debugging.
Using outdated tech is a natural habit—and potentially a deadly one. The Y2K bug was powerful enough to break that habit in most places.
“It was definitely a huge thing,” said the financial-sector employee. “And I think it probably had a very wide-ranging impact even beyond just avoiding that problem, because I think for a lot of organizations it was the biggest project they ever did.” The massive review and rebuilding of every corporate corpuscle changed companies, project planning and individual careers—something the employee saw first-hand.
Kids, if anybody tries to tell you the Y2K bug was a fake, ask if them if Salk’s vaccine meant polio was a hoax. I know you kids have no idea what I’m talking about, but trust me, you’ll love the look on grown-ups’ faces.
1 The article’s author later explained the Y2K bug was in the original list, but he removed it because it wasn’t “a single bug” but rather a widespread industry problem, which he likened to thoughtless coding in general. To me, this is like removing World War II from a list of history’s greatest conflicts because it involved more than two countries.
2 There is dispute over whether
the Y2K problem should be considered a “bug” per se since the term usually
refers to an unintentional glitch or oversight. The two-digit year coding began
as a deliberate act to save memory space, which in those days was extremely
tight and expensive. However, even as memory grew, the two-digit coding
practice remained for about a decade, which most programmers agree was because
of sheer habit. In any case, the two-digit coding was recognized as a built-in
problem from the start; its wide-ranging effects were not wholly anticipated.
Some programmers began writing debugging programs as early as the 1980s.
3 I recently discovered a
cache of my personal Y2K archives, which include further glitch reports. On
Computers choked again on
The bulk of the facts in this column were taken from
all Y2K-related articles in the