Twenty-five years after the Y2K scare, a look back at the issue and the efforts that prevented a major technological disaster.
Twenty-five years ago on January 1, despite panic and fear that the world was soon to collapse into chaos, nothing much happened.That said, the fact Y2K rose to little more than a footnote in the annals of the information age is largely due to the countless individuals who spent years working out the best way to deploy a relatively simple fix to computers around the world. If not for the herculean effort with which they greeted a potentially Sisyphean task, we might have been way worse off.
The Y2K problem was actually pretty straightforward to fix: At its core, it was a practical choice - driven by awareness of memory constraints - made by computer programmers in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. They built their systems with little regard for what would happen when the world entered a new millennium - they coded all those legacy systems with two-digit year dates, meaning when the year changed from 99 to 00, systems could interpret the change as a return to 1900 - not 2000. Expanding year fields to four digits resolved the issue, but implementing this fix was a complex and labor-intensive process. Patch management wasn't as easy then as it is now. Auckland Airport in New Zealand said it wasn't having any problems in a blog post dated January 1 in the year 100, similar to the way many websites displayed dates in the early days of the new millennium (e.g., the year 3900 showed up, as did 19100, 19200 and 4000 and DATE INVALID). Instead of reading zero, some sites with millennium countdowns reset to indicating the year 2000 wouldn't come for 1,901 more years, and webmail services were reporting incorrect dates, too. Again, all those issues were minor - the email systems functioned normally, flights stayed in the air, lights were still on, and the world kept moving. Chances are good that, were we to dig into the postmortem of all those little issues we'd find a lot of IT admins with eggs on their faces for not responding to the need to patch things
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