the Y2K Story

At the end of the millennium the internet had revolutionized computers. But, as we dialed up to the information highway, a "computer bug" was threatening our increasingly tech dependent world. We look back at emerging digital culture in 1999, and how the "bug" called Y2K changed the future.

By 1999 computers had transformed everyday life around the world, but an invisible digital enemy called Y2K threatened to bring it all down. Would the electrical grid collapse? Would planes fall from the sky? The US government responded with a bipartisan effort to prevent the worst from happening.

During the late 1990's media and advertising invested millions of dollars on campaigns and content about the new millennium. Stories of the future were optimistic and poked fun at the feared chaos of the Y2K "bug." A plot twist came when the future became the present on January 1, 2000.

Y2K fears caused suburban families, religious fanatics, and militia groups to prepare for the end of the world. With the rumors of a mass technology failure to add to the anxiety of a new millennium, survival kits were tucked away and a few people headed for the hills. Meanwhile, the US government tried to keep the public calm.

Fixing the Y2K problem required billions of lines of code to be rewritten. A shortage of programmers in the US led companies to rely on India's growing tech industry to solve the Y2K computer problem. The vast programming needs led to the birth of a tech offshoring industry during the early years of globalization.

The final hours before the new millennium was a critical period for governments and organizations around the world. Some spent New Year's Eve 1999 watching the digital clock, others were rapidly rewriting the final strokes of code. Television correspondents were staged at critical points across the globe ready to capture the explosion.

On New Year's Day 2000 most people thought Y2K was a false alarm. Only people who worked to fix the problem knew how much had been done to avert a crisis. But in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, some systems were able to restart because of to the work done for Y2K.

After Y2K it was clear that technology had connected business, governments, and people across the world like never before. Solving the Y2K problem depended on a global scale of cooperation that offers hope for addressing modern problems on a large scale.