Y Bug (2K) - The Crisis Comes And Goes

But in the months leading up to the crucial rol-lover, no one could say with any certainty just what the Y2K bug's effects would be. While some insisted the whole phenomenon was much ado about nothing, others warned of potentially costly and disruptive side effects if companies, organizations, governments, and individuals didn't work to ready their own systems. Most groups chose to play it safe, investing hefty sums to purchase Y2K-compliance software or hire outside consultants to root through their systems and fix any potential trouble spots. In the process, an enormous Y2K industry was spawned. Estimates of total U.S. Y2K expenditures reached into the hundreds of billions of dollars, while the worldwide total topped $600 billion. According to Peter de Jager, the U.S. government alone spent $8.34 billion on year-2000 compliance.

As midnight on December 31, 1999 approached, businesses and governments all over the world maintained staff on-call, ready to respond at a moment's notice should catastrophe strike. Cisco Systems Inc., for example, kept nearly half of their 22,000 employees on call during the rollover.

Finally, the crucial date came and went, and to the surprise of many, virtually nothing happened—certainly nothing on the order of the more dire predictions. The extent to which the Y2K bug's benign effects were the result of vigilant compliance measures or of the bug's relatively benign nature was a matter of debate, and commentators had yet to reach consensus on the matter even two years later. There were glitches, even in some major systems. For instance, a U.S. military satellite surveillance system went down and wasn't recovered for several weeks. But on the whole, the extent of preparation—to say nothing of the newsprint and hysteria—seemed vastly out of proportion with the event itself.