The Computer Bug That Almost Ended The World | The Y2k Debacle

Michael Bolton? Wow! Is that your real name?

I was born in 1999 so I never seen the whole thing unfold, but it's always fascinating hearing about this. Reminds a bit of the 2012 panic in a way.

I was 10 during y2k. I remember my dad telling us kids to be realistic because of course things weren't going to end, so not everyone was panicking

As someone who never witnessed Y2K i kinda feel bad for the people afterwards like the turn of a millennium is a pretty big event and not celebrating it because of fear is kinda sad

The people who helped fix Y2K deserve more credit. Thankfully we have people who took into account the situation early

Ah, the Y2K scare. I remember my parents buying a whole bunch of things “just in case” and my uncle flipping his shit up ‘cause my cousin and I wanted to play games on their computer and he thought we would end killing the hard drive

I still have a vivid memory of going to best buy to upgrade our family computer shortly before y2k. It was a pretty serious conversation had with a sales agent to "make sure you turn your pc off" before the clock turned over. Funny enough I ended up working for best buy from about 2016-2019 and while working with the project team to renovate our store we found some of the y2k stickers they used to place on computers under a base deck. Me and a couple others grabbed a few and I still have them. Great video!

Y2K is so fascinating! I wonder if this debacle will repeat itself in 2038 when the Unix timestamp overflows...

I was 11 during y2k. I remember watching people panicking on TV, Americans running out and buying guns, people hoarding food and water. We did out usual thing as a family. Ate dinner and played board games untill the countdown all while watching the world make absolute fools of themselves when the clock rolled over and the world didnt end. Keep in mind by the time we hit midnight, several other time zones had already rolled over. If something really was going to happen, we would have already known about it hours before our "midnight". Y2K was funny.

one of my favorite parts about the whole y2k scare is that there were news reports listing some of the concerns that would come with it, and one of them was "dog packs". incredibly curious how the destruction of the internet would result in feral dog packs attacking?

The reason Y2K never "happened" is because countless people worked very hard behind the scenes reprogramming various systems, etc. This was a serious problem that would have resulted in many important computer systems shutting down.

I can only imagine how akward it was when absolutely nothing happened and they've been preparing for months

My family has thrown New Year’s Eve parties for many, many years- my grandparents started throwing them and eventually my parents took over. I was 15 in 1999, and I remember the panic so many people were falling victim to quite vividly. Well, my parents didn’t think much of the whole situation and went about setting everything up for the party as per usual. So, we ended up with a house full of people dancing to whatever music my father was blaring from the speakers that hung from the ceiling in nearly every room in our house and drinking whatever kind of beer, cocktail, or shot was handed to them. Basically we had a huge crowd of drunk people who were just a bit more susceptible to believing certain things than they would’ve had they been sober. Once it was close to midnight, my father put on a CD that was loud and had a beat that would get people dancing. Then he, two of my uncles, a cousin of mine, and I went into the walk-in closet in my bedroom. There in the wall of my closet was the breaker box…and in that box was the breaker which would turn off the power to the entire house. The little door to the breaker box was opened and we stood there staring at that large breaker listening to the music. We listened and we waited for the music to pause and for the group of people to start counting down the seconds to midnight. After what felt like an eternity, the drunken throng began enthusiastically chanting, “10! 9! 8! 7!…” All of us standing in the closet in my room had various degrees of devious grins on our faces. One of my uncle’s remarked, “You better hope that no one freaks out too badly.” All of us laughed as the crowd then thundered, “ZERO! HAP-“ Then my father threw the switch. The whole house fell into complete darkness and total silence…but only for a moment. The silence lasted for only a second or two at most. There were shrieks and fearful screams from some of the guests. We again laughed. Then, coming from the living room, was my mother’s voice, “GODDAMN IT, BRYAN! If you don’t the electricity back on, I’ll-“ My father flipped the switch on faster than he had turned it off only moments ago. My uncles, cousin, and I laughed hysterically at that moment. It was clear that things in the new millennium weren’t going to be any different than they were before.

Good ol' Y2K. I was a homeless punk kid during that whole mess. I fully admit to getting drunk with a couple of my friends and sitting next to an ATM until after midnight just in case it was all true and the thing would spit out a bunch of cash.

A big reason my family immigrated to the states was because of this. My dad used to be a computer programmer and the US was recruiting people all over the world to help debug computers to prevent what you describe from happening. It’s pretty amazing that my upbringing and life path was heavily reliant on this bug. Great video!

I remember a couple of times when my parents would gloss over this story, they usually say something like “everyone thought that the computers were going to blow up” and left it at that. I never knew there was a reason to why they thought that, and how many people took it very seriously. This video was awesome and I really enjoyed it.

When I was growing up, my grandma always told me "when emotions are high, the intelligence is low no matter how smart a person is", even tho it wasn't related to Y2K it applies to it and pretty much everything. Many people today (especially the ones born after that or have been babies in the late 90s) have no idea how scary it was for many people back then and probably think how stupid people were. I was just 9 years old in 1999 and even tho it didn't affected me because I just had no idea about financing, savings, banks etc. I remember how big of a deal was for a lot of grown ups at the time. They didn't think the world will end or something like that but a lot of them were saying to everyone to get all their money from the banks before January 1st 2000 because their money could disappear and there was this huge surge of people in the banks to withdrawal their savings and was genuinely terrifying for most people to lose all their money because of a computer.

I just remember seeing my parents computer screen flipping upside down when 2000 came on. It may have been just a trick my dad did on the monitor but it freaked me out a bit.

You’d think that the lesson to “think more critically about what you read online” would still be in the minds of people a mere 22 years after, but NOOOOOOOOO. Apparently humans forget things so easily that we don’t even remember the lessons learned from a near apocalyptic scale scare for not even half a quarter of an average lifespan 🤦

My manager remembered that on his previous job, they were offered 5 times their daily salary just to render overtime the whole night of December 31, 1999 until the morning of January 1, 2000. Along with that salary increase, my manager said that his previous employer also gave "survival kits" to those who rendered overtime, like the company gonna be turned into a "survival shelter" just in case "Y2K becomes armaggedon".