The Y2K Bug Total Non-Event: 25 Years On, What Was That All About?

It’s easy to be nostalgic about 1999. But if, whether via your own hazy recollections or things you’ve picked up on social media, you think the last year of the 20th century was all about Britney Spears taking over the planet, Brad and Jen’s great love and, most of all, the life-altering decision of which glitter eyeshadow to wear on Millennium Eve, you’re forgetting something huge and scary.

Because, for a while there, we all believed that, once 1999 flipped into 2000, civilization as we know it would end. More terrifying than anything with six legs or a poisonous sting in its tail, the Y2K Bug threatened to bring down the world one computer at a time.

Yes, we seriously all feared that those clunky beige boxes that we played Solitaire on simply wouldn’t cope with the dawn of a new century and that everything that relied on technology to function would suddenly and epically fail. It was all over the news, and it was all your dad’s nerdy friend who worked in IT could talk about.

In the end, it was the greatest non-event of, well, the millennium — and that might be largely down to your dad’s nerdy friend who worked in IT and the thousands like him who, it turns out, were superheroes. What was that all about?

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Let’s break down the terror: decades earlier, when programmers wrote software, they used two digits to represent the year (so, 1998 was just “98”), because back then, memory space was precious. They never imagined their code would survive past 1999, because, of course, by the year 2000 we’d all be living on the moon.

Fast forward to the late ‘90s, and people began to realize that when the calendar flipped to January 1, 2000, all those “98s” and “99s” would become “00,” and computers would freak out. Clocks would malfunction, banks would collapse, power grids would go down, airplanes would go all Final Destination and Tamagotchis would start an uprising.

People weren’t just mildly concerned; they were ready to hoard canned tuna and build underground bunkers. Governments spent billions on Y2K compliance. News anchors told us that the global economy was hanging by a thread, just waiting for a single tick of the clock to throw us into darkness. Humanity would somehow have to survive without Ask Jeeves and Minesweeper.

It turns out, though, we were in safe hands. Programmers became overnight rock stars (and some of them wore Von Dutch trucker hats to prove it). Back then, we called them IT workers rather than tech bros, they wore short-sleeved plaid shirts rather than Patagonia gilets and their offices didn’t even have ping-pong tables and pizza Fridays. But they worked HARD, combing through millions of lines of gobbledygook to fix that whole annoying date thing. New codes were… coded? Systems were… upgraded? Basically, the tech got teched by the techies real good.

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By the time the last day of 1999 rolled around, the world was ready, champagne flute in one hand and Nokia 3310 in the other. Finally, the clock struck midnight and… nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Computers kept computing. Banks stayed banky. No printer that we know of spewed out millions of sheets of paper printed with an “ERROR: 1900” message. Coffee machines did not come to life and kill us all, while speaking in binary. And Tamagotchis continued to languish in the junk drawer, hungry and depleted of battery. Everything just… worked. Great, right?

A quarter of a century later, the Y2K Bug is regarded as a great example of the incredible power of collective paranoia and mass hysteria. But, at the time, some people, as they sheepishly redistributed their stashes of tinned goods, were disappointed. Some people even said it had all been a hoax, refusing to give any credit to all those IT dudes, long-suffering and long-haired, who had fixed the problem so efficiently behind the scenes while we were busy overplucking our eyebrows and learning the words to “No Scrubs.”

So, they got their revenge and invented social media.