Information about Year 2000 Problem

The Year 2000 problem (also known as the Y2K problem, the millennium bug or the Y2K Bug) was the result of a practice in early computer program design that caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after January 1, 2000. It caused widespread concern that critical industries (such as electricity or finance) and government functions would cease operating at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999 and on other critical dates which were billed "event horizons". This fear was fueled by the attendant press coverage and other media speculation, as well as corporate and government reports. People recognized that long-working systems could break down when the 97, 98, 99 ascending numbering assumption suddenly became invalid. Companies and organizations world-wide checked and upgraded their computer systems. Therefore, while no significant computer failures occurred when the clocks rolled over into 2000, preparation for the Y2K bug had a significant effect on the computer industry. Debate continues on whether the absence of computer failures was the result of the preparation undertaken or whether the significance of the problem had been overstated.

Background

Y2K was the common abbreviation for the year 2000 software problem. The abbreviation combines the letter Y for "year", and k for the Greek prefix kilo meaning 1000; hence, 2K signifies 2000. It was also named the Millennium Bug because it was associated with a roll-over of the millennium.

The Year 2000 problem was the subject of the early book, "Computers in Crisis" by Jerome and Marilyn Murray (Petrocelli, 1984; reissued by McGraw-Hill under the title "The Year 2000 Computing Crisis" in 1996). The first recorded mention of the Year 2000 Problem on a Usenet newsgroup occurred Saturday, January 19, 1985 by Usenet poster Spencer Bolles.^[1]

The acronym Y2K has been attributed to David Eddy, a Massachusetts programmer,^[2] in an e-mail sent on June 12, 1995. He later said, "People were calling it CDC (Century Date Change) and FADL (Faulty Date Logic). There were other contenders. It just came off my COBOL calloused fingertips."

It was speculated that computer programs could stop working or produce erroneous results because they stored years with only two digits and that the year 2000 would be represented by 00 and would be interpreted by software as the year 1900. This would cause date comparisons to produce incorrect results. It was also thought that embedded systems, making use of similar date logic, might fail and cause utilities and other crucial infrastructure to fail.

Special committees were set up by governments to monitor remedial work and contingency planning, particularly by crucial infrastructures such as telecommunications, utilities and the like, to ensure that the most critical services had fixed their own problems and were prepared for problems with others. It was only the safe passing of the main "event horizon" itself, January 1, 2000, that fully quelled public fears.

In North America the actions taken to remedy the possible problems had unexpected benefits. Many businesses installed computer backup systems for critical files. The Y2K preparations had an impact on August 14, 2003 during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. The previous activities had included the installation of new electrical generation equipment and systems, which allowed for a relatively rapid restoration of power in some areas.

The programming problem

The practice of using two-digit dates for convenience long predates computers, notably in artwork. Abbreviated dates do not pose a problem for humans, as works and events pertaining to one century are sufficiently different from those of other centuries. Computers, however, are unable to make such distinctions.

In the 1960s, computer memory was scarce and expensive, and most data processing was done on punch cards which represented text data in 80-column records. Programming languages of the time, such as COBOL and RPG, processed numbers in their ASCII or EBCDIC representations. They occasionally used an extra bit called a "zone punch" to save one character for a minus sign on a negative number, or compressed two digits into one byte in a form called binary-coded decimal, but otherwise processed numbers as straight text. Over time the punch cards were converted to magnetic tape and then disk files and later to simple databases like ISAM, but the structure of the programs usually changed very little. Popular software like dBase continued the practice of storing dates as text well into the 1980s and 1990s.

Saving two characters for every date field was significant in the 1960s. Since programs at that time were mostly short-lived affairs programmed to solve a specific problem, or control a specific hardware setup, neither managers nor programmers of that time expected their programs to remain in use for many decades. The realization that databases were a new type of program with different characteristics had not yet come, and hence most did not consider fixing two digits of the year a significant problem. There were exceptions, of course; the first person known to publicly address the problem was Bob Bemer who had noticed it in 1958, as a result of work on genealogical software. He spent the next twenty years trying to make programmers, IBM, the US government and the ISO aware of the problem, with little result. This included the recommendation that the COBOL PICTURE clause should be used to specify four digit years for dates. This could have been done by programmers at any time from the initial release of the first COBOL compiler in 1961 onwards. However, lack of foresight, the desire to save storage space, and overall complacency prevented this advice from being followed. Despite magazine articles on the subject from 1970 onwards, the majority of programmers only started recognizing Y2K as a looming problem in the mid-1990s, but even then, inertia and complacency caused it to be mostly ignored until the last few years of the decade.

Storage of a combined date and time within a fixed binary field is often considered a solution, but the possibility for software to misinterpret dates remains, because such date and time representations must be relative to a defined origin. Rollover of such systems is still a problem but can happen at varying dates and can fail in various ways. For example:

• The typical Unix timestamp (time_t) stores a date and time as a 32-bit signed integer number representing, roughly speaking, the number of seconds since January 1 1970, and will roll over in 2038 and cause the Year 2038 problem. To solve this problem, many systems and languages have switched to a 64-bit version, or supplied alternatives which are 64-bit.
• The popular spreadsheet Microsoft Excel stores a date as a number of days since an origin (often erroneously called a Julian date). A "Julian date" stored in a 16-bit integer will overflow after 65,536 days (approximately 179 years). Unfortunately, the Windows versions of the program by default start at 1900 and the Mac versions by default start at 1904 (although this can usually be changed).
• The Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program also had a very elementary Y2K problem: Excel (in both Windows versions and Mac version, when they are set to start at 1900) incorrectly set the year 1900 as a leap year. In addition, the years 2100, 2200 and so on were regarded as leap years. This bug was fixed in later versions, but since the epoch of the Excel timestamp was set as January 1, 1900 in previous versions, the year 1900 is still regarded as a leap year to maintain backward compatibility.
• In the C programming language, the standard library function to get the current year originally did have the problem that it returned only the year number within the 20th century, and for compatibility's sake still returns the year as year minus 1900. Many programmers in C, and in Perl and Java, two programming languages widely used in Web development that use the C functions, incorrectly treated this value as the last two digits of the year. On the Web this was a mostly harmless bug, but it did cause many dynamically generated webpages to display January 1, 2000, as "1/1/19100", "1/1/100", or variations of that depending on the format.
• Older applications written for the commonly used UNIX source code control system SCCS failed to handle years that began with the digit "2".
• In the Windows 3.1 file manager, dates were shown as 1/1/19:0 for 1/1/2000. An update was available on the internet for those still using Windows 3.1.

Even before January 1, 2000 arrived, there were also some worries about September 9, 1999 (albeit lesser compared to those generated by Y2K). This date could also be written in the numeric format, 9/9/99. This date value was frequently used to specify an unknown date; it was thus possible that programs might act on the records containing unknown dates on that day. [1] It is also somewhat similar to the end-of-file code, 9999, in old programming languages. It was feared that some programs might unexpectedly terminate on that date. The bug however was more likely to confuse computer operators than machines.

Another related problem for calculations involving the year 2000 was that it was a leap year even though years ending in "00" are normally not leap years. A year is a leap year if it is divisible by 4 but not divisible by 100 unless also divisible by 400. For example, 1600 was a leap year, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. Fortunately most programs were fixed in time, although the vast majority simply rely on the rule that a year divisible by 4 is always a leap year, which incidentally works well on 2000; if the change of century had been 1899-1900 or 2099-2100 (non leap century years), then virtually every piece of software would have had to be changed.

The problem was compounded by the need of many systems, especially in the financial services sector, to calculate expiration and renewal dates in the future. For example, a company that sold five-year bonds would start getting Y2K problems in 1995, when its systems needed to calculate an expiration date of 2000; with two-digit years, the "00" of the expiration date would appear to be earlier than the "95" of the start date.

Documented errors

Before 2000

• In 1999 HSBC issued 10,000 card swipe machines, manufactured by Racal, to retailers, but a Y2K flaw prevented them from reading expiration dates properly. The stores had to rely on paper transactions, as they do when there are power failures or phone line failures, until replacement machines arrived. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/582007.stm

On 1 January 2000

When January 1, 2000, arrived, there were problems generally regarded as minor. Problems did not always have to occur precisely at midnight. Some programs were not active at that moment and would only show up when they were invoked. Not all problems recorded were directly linked to Y2K programming in a causality; minor technology glitches occur on a regular basis, as anyone who ever had to reboot a personal computer will recognize.

Reported problems include:

• In Ishikawa, Japan, radiation-monitoring equipment failed at midnight, but officials said there was no risk to the public. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/585013.stm
• In Onagawa, Japan, an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant at two minutes after midnight. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/585013.stm
• In Japan, at two minutes past midnight, Osaka Media Port, a telecommunications carrier, found errors in the date management part of the company's network. The problem was fixed by 2:43 a.m. and no services were disrupted. http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/01/03/japan.nukes.y2k.idg
• In Japan, NTT Mobile Communications Network (NTT DoCoMo), Japan's largest cellular operator, reported on January 1, 2000, that some models of mobile telephones were deleting new messages received, rather than the older messages, as the memory filled up. http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/01/03/japan.nukes.y2k.idg
• In Australia, bus-ticket-validation machines in two states failed to operate. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/586620.stm
• In the United States, 150 slot machines at race tracks in Delaware stopped working. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/586620.stm
• In the United States, the U.S. Naval Observatory, which runs the master clock that keeps the country's official time, had a Y2K glitch on its Web site. Due to a programming problem, the site reported that the date was Jan. 1, "19100." http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/01/01/y2k.weekend.wrap/index.html
• In France, the national weather forecasting service, Meteo France, said a Y2K bug made the date on a webpage show a map with Saturday's weather forecast as "01/01/19100". http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/586620.stm
• In the United Kingdom, some credit card transactions were declined or failed altogether as certain systems interacted.
• In Italy, Telecom Italia sent out the first two months bills, dated January 1900
• In the United States, Iowa, a man was charged for an overdue video he rented because the computer thought it was due back in 1900
• In the United States, Pennsylvania, an elementary school library computer overcharged the student body for having checked-out books for 100 years.

Government Response

US Government

The United States Government responded to the Y2K threat by passing the Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act, by working with private sector counterparts in order to ensure readiness, and by creating internal continuity of operations plans in the event of problems. The effort was headed out of the White House by the President’s Council On Year 2000 Conversion, headed John Koskinen.^[3] The White House effort was conducted in coordination with the then-independent agency FEMA, which was well staffed and thoroughly prepared in the event it was needed. The US Government promoted Y2K Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) to share readiness between industries, without threat of antitrust violations or liability based on information shared.

The US Government followed a three part approach to the problem: (1) Outreach and Advocacy (2) Monitoring and Assessment and (3) Contingency Planning and Regulation.^[4]

A feature of US Government outreach was Y2K websites including Y2K.GOV. Presently, many US Government agencies have taken down their Y2K websites. Some of these documents may be available through National Archives and Records Administration^[5] or The Wayback Machine.

Each federal agency had its own Y2K task force which worked with its private sector counter parts. The FCC had the FCC Year 2000 Task Force.^[6][7]

Most industries had contingency plans that relied upon the Internet for backup communications. However, as no federal agency had clear authority with regard to the Internet at this time (it had passed from the US Department of Defense to the US National Science Foundation and then to the US Department of Commerce), no agency was assessing the readiness of the Internet itself. Therefore on July 30, 1999 the White House held the White House Internet Y2K Roundtable.^[8]

Was the expenditure worth the effort?

The total cost of the work done in preparation for Y2K is estimated at over 300 billion US dollars. [2] There are two ways to view the events of 2000 from the perspective of its aftermath:

Supporting view

This view holds that the vast majority of problems had been fixed correctly, and the money was well spent. The situation was essentially one of pre-emptive alarm. Those who hold this view claim that the lack of problems at the date change reflect the completeness of the project, and that many computer applications would not have continued to function into the 21st century without correction or remediation.

• This view was adopted by most of the (fairly limited) official examinations of Y2K projects undertaken after their completion.http://canberra.usembassy.gov/hyper/2000/0127/epf407.htm
• It has also been suggested that on September 11, 2001, the New York infrastructure (including subways, phone service, and financial transactions) were able to continue operation because of the redundant networks established in the event of Y2K bug impacthttp://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/terror-1120.html and the contingency plans devised by companies.http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2002/03/cumming.htm The terrorist attacks and the following prolonged blackout to lower Manhattan had minimal effect on global banking systems. Backup systems were activated at various locations around the region, many of which had been established to deal with a possible complete failure of networks in the financial district on December 31, 1999.http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/terror.html Had the emphasis on creating backup systems to deal with Y2K not occurred, much greater disruption to the economy could have occurred. Decentralization of infrastructure—in particular, the creation of multiple sites for backup data—helped keep banks up and running.
• It was suggested that Y2K plans were used to ground aircraft on 9/11, but the grounding was a variant of the^[9] SCATANA procedures developed in the 1970s.

Opposing view

Others have claimed that there were no, or very few, critical problems to begin with, and that correcting the few minor mistakes as they occurred (the 'fix on failure' approach) would have been the most efficient and cost effective way to solve the problem. This view was bolstered by a number of observations.

• The lack of Y2K-related problems in schools, many of which undertook little or no remediation effort. By September 1, 1999 only 28 percent of US schools had achieved compliance for mission critical systems, and a government report predicted that "Y2K failures could very well plague the computers used by schools to manage payrolls, student records, online curricula, and building safety systems". http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showstory.cfm?ArticleID=404
• The lack of Y2K-related problems in an estimated 1.5 million small businesses that undertook no remediation effort. On 3 January 2000 the Small Business Administration received an estimated 40 calls from businesses with computer problems, similar to the average. None of the problems were critical.http://www.rickross.com/reference/y2k/y2k37.html
• The lack of Y2K-related problems in countries such as Italy, which undertook a far more limited remediation effort than the United States. In an October 22, 1999, report, a US Senate Committee expressed concern about safe travel outside of the United States. The report stated that overseas public transit systems were considered vulnerable because many did not have an aggressive response plan in place for any problems. Internationally, the report singled out Italy, China and Russia as poorly prepared. The Australian government evacuated all but three embassy staff from Russia http://www.abc.net.au/am/stories/s69974.htm. None of these countries experienced any Y2K problems regarded as worth reporting http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/law/st_org/iptf/headlines/content/1999112801.html.
• The absence of Y2K-related problems occurring before January 1, 2000, even though the 2000 financial year commenced in 1999 in many jurisdictions, and a wide range of forward-looking calculations involved dates in 2000 and later years. Estimates undertaken in the leadup to 2000 suggested that around 25% of all problems should have occurred before 2000.http://www.enquirer.com/editions/1999/02/14/fin_lights_out_y2k.html Critics of large-scale remediation argued, during 1999, that the absence of significant problems, even in systems that had not been rendered compliant, suggested that the scale of the problem had been overestimated.http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/johnquiggin/news/Millennium9908.html

Facts, figures and popular culture

Facts

• The United States established the "Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act", which limited the liability of businesses who had properly disclosed their Y2K readiness.
• Insurance companies sold insurance policies covering failure of businesses due to Y2K problems.
• Attorneys organized and mobilized for Y2K class action lawsuits (which were not pursued).
• Survivalist-related businesses (gun dealers, surplus and sporting goods, LDS bookstores selling freeze-dried food) anticipated increased business in the final months of 1999. Some of these businesses experienced increased sales; some did not.
• No major failures of infrastructure were reported in the United States or even in many places where they had been widely expected, such as Russia.
• The Long Now Foundation, which (in their words) "seeks to promote 'slower/better' thinking and to foster creativity in the framework of the next 10,000 years", has a policy of anticipating the Year 10,000 problem by writing all years with five digits. For example, they list "01996" as their year of founding.

Quotes

• "We may not have got everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end." – Parodic science fiction author Douglas Adams, in an advertisement for Apple Macintosh personal computers, which even on date of release could accurately render dates to the year 2020 (that threshold has since been extended by over 60 millennia)
• "Computing consultants laughing all the way to the bank." – Popular catchphrase used by the Australian media on the First of January 2000.
• "The Y2K problem is the electronic equivalent of the El Niño and there will be nasty surprises around the globe." – John Hamre, Deputy Secretary of Defense http://www.cnn.com/TECH/specials/y2k/
• "I’m one of the culprits who created this problem. I used to write those programs back in the 1960s and 1970s, and was proud of the fact that I was able to squeeze a few elements of space out of my program by not having to put a 19 before the year. Back then, it was very important. We used to spend a lot of time running through various mathematical exercises before we started to write our programs so that they could be very clearly delimited with respect to space and the use of capacity. It never entered our minds that those programs would have lasted for more than a few years. As a consequence, they are very poorly documented. If I were to go back and look at some of the programs I wrote 30 years ago, I would have one terribly difficult time working my way through step-by-step." [Testimony by Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve before Senate Banking Committee, February 25, 1998 ISBN 0-16-057997-X]
• "Hopefully all the bloody stars don't go out on January 1, 2000!" Fleet General Manager Al Murphy of Teekay Shipping commenting on a contingency plan for maritime navigation involving the use of a sextant.(www.teekay.com/tkspirit/060898.pdfPDF)

Y2K in popular culture

"Y2K disaster" novels sold widely in the last days of 1999, but after the predicted disasters failed to materialize they were allowed to go out of print.

• R.J. Pineiro wrote two novels about the Y2K bug, predicting massive computer malfunctions, chaos, and civil disorder.
• Mark Joseph wrote a novel called Deadline Y2K, expressing similar concerns.
• The End As I Know It is a 2007 novel by Kevin Shay about a young man in 1998 and 1999 trying to warn his friends about Y2K.

Movies and television shows also capitalized on Y2K fears.

• was a movie about a gang of criminals taking over a town after Y2K.
• In an episode of The Drew Carey Show, Drew and his friends prepare for Y2K by setting up a bomb shelter. After the Millennium Bug took effect, much of Cleveland was in ruins, and Drew was the only survivor left in the bomb shelter. As he prepares to relax with his complete Playboy collection, he sneezes and his glasses fall off and break. This is also a reference to the Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last" in which a similar situation occurs.
• Professional Wrestler Chris Jericho used the Y2K problem to his own advantage creating a parody of it, Y2J. He did so to get his gimmick over with the fans in the company he was working for, World Wrestling Entertainment.
• In the 1999 movie Office Space, the main character's job is to rewrite bank software to use dates with 4-digit years instead of 2.
• The Halloween episode of The Simpsons for the 1999-2000 season, Treehouse of Horror X, contained a sketch fittingly entitled "Life's A Glitch, Then You Die". Homer's failure to check Y2K preparedness at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant results in a global technology-related catastrophe.
• An episode of King of the Hill featured Y2K in which Hank Hill became paranoid about possible Y2K problems, but eventually decided that its better to enjoy a life with risks than to be overly cautious all the time.
• The Family Guy episode "Da Boom" (aired December 26, 1999) featured the Griffin family surviving the end of civilization, caused by the Y2K bug. At the end of the episode, it is revealed in a Dallas parody that the episode was all just a dream. In the same episode, life-size chicken tells Peter that the whole world is going to end, Peter then replies saying, "Y2K?, what are you selling? Chicken or Sex-Jelly?".
• The flashback portions of the episode ""' of (aired May 5, 1999) takes place on December 31, 2000, where an ancestor of Captain Kathryn Janeway, Shannon O'Donnell, claims that "the Y2K bug couldn't even turn off a single light bulb."
• A 'Y2K compliance checker' made by RJL software was a popular Y2K computer prank. It causes harmless effects, like flashing the screen, opening the CD drive, chattering the floppy drive, playing sounds, and more. In the end, it informs you that your sound card is not compliant, and to fix it, it informs you that you must flip your hard drive on its side for all of 2000.
• The NewsRadio episode "Meet the Max Louis" had a subplot in which the station's electrician Joe Garelli dealt with the effects of him programming the computer system to Jesus' "actual" birth-date. The episode was filmed in 1998, so they were experiencing the year 2000 problem two years early.
• In Labyrinth - a Novel about the Software Industry by Arunabha Sengupta, the plight of the engineers working for greedy companies in the outsourcing capital of India to beat the Y2K deadline for their worldwide clients is vividly described.
• In the episode "Y2K"of Dilbert, Wally is given command to fix the company computer systems for Y2K. He fixes them, only finding out that the millennium starts on January 1, 2001.
• Several different movies with the title Y2K were made: Y2K (1999) and Y2K: The Movie (1999) (TV).
• The popular web comic Kevin and Kell had several story angles relating to Y2K. One of the primary characters, Fiona Fennec, was granted magic powers by "aliens" (really the "Great Bird Conspiracy") to fix the problem on a global scale.
• The 1999 film Entrapment, presented the two thieves, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery, to synchronize their plans according to the turn of the millennium, taking advantage of the technical problems.
• Jennifer Lopez's music video for her 1999 single Waiting for Tonight featured a power failure during a party held on the beginning of 2000.
• In the "Weird Al" Yankovic song "It's All About the Pentiums", Weird Al claims that he "ain't afraid of Y2K."
• The webcomic After Y2K was started in February 1999, with humorous predictions of what would happen after major systems, including computers, broke down. The archives of the comic are still available on the creators' website, at geekculture.com.
• In , the Y2K problem is said to be a conspiracy for the US government to distribute and run a worldwide content filtering system.
• In the 2000 anime film, Digimon: , the villainous Diaboromon is a personification of the Y2K bug. In an exaggeration of some expected events, he cuts off the phone networks and launches a nuclear missile at Tokyo.
• In Season 2 of Sports Night, the episode 'Kafelnikov', originally aired on Tuesday 2 November 1999, on ABC, is devoted to Jeremy's attempts to prove the studio is Y2K compatible, resulting in complete power loss. It later transpires that the power loss was due to him hitting the panic button, as the electric board had been rewired without relabelling it.
• In Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories, the Y2K bug is used by the Ammunation guns shop as an advertising campaign to sell weapons to confront its apocalyptic effects.
• At the end of The World Is Not Enough, Q's assistant, R, pulls the plug on a thermal imaging clip from a satellite depicting James Bond with Christmas Jones and blames it on a "premature form of the Millennium Bug".
• In 1999 Steve Jackson Games published GURPS Y2K, role-playing game sourcebook containing ideas for developing Y2K-related game scenarios, as well as other "near future" disaster scenarios. Coincidentally, the GURPS game itself suffered from an Y2K bug of a kind: year 2000 marks move to next Technology Level, and many of the predictions related to that have not yet come to pass. The most recent edition of the game solved the problem by making 1980 the threshold year, marking the beginning of the 'Information Age'.
• In the cartoon The Angry Beavers, the two beavers have a New Year's party for the year 2000. As the clock strikes midnight, they find that they are in a place that is pitch black and get to change the world.
• In a flashback episode of My Name Is Earl, Earl, Randy, Joy, Darnell, and Donny assume that Y2K will wipe their criminal records and let them start clean. At midnight, their power goes out (because Donny's sister likes to screw with the electric company) and they assume the New Year's fireworks are guns and grenades going off. The next morning, they believe they are the last humans alive while the town is at the New Year's parade. The gang then breaks into a store, where they establish a new world order, but the new world crumbles when the store opens on January 2nd.
• Loudon Wainwright III has a song called Y2K on his album Social Studies. http://www.rosebudus.com/wainwright/Y2K.html
• Many radio stations ran contests for the best Y2K song, one of which can be heard here.
• On the Homestar Runner website, Strong Bad creates a candy bar whose advertising jingle includes such "feel-good" lyrics as "Y2K turned out all right," .
• On Sky One's "50 Terrible Predictions", the Millennium Bug came first.
• In Futurama, Philip J. Fry is frozen in a cryogenic tube just after midnight on January 1st in the episode, "Space Pilot 3000". Fry's father is obsessed with the Y2K bug, during the flashback in the episode, "Jurassic Bark". Also, in the episode "Xmas Story", when "Conan O'Brien" attempts to make a Y2K joke, Bender claims, "They fixed that 900 years ago!" Thus, in the Futurama timeline, Y2K wasn't repaired until sometime in the year 2100.
• Also in Futurama, one of the opening title gags read "Not Y3K Compatible".
• In Mad About You, Paul had a dream about Y2K bug solution and when he wakes up he tries to remember it and to put it into effect.
• The car company Kia had a series of commercials saying that Y2K meant "Yes to Kia"
• In Max Payne the main character views over some occult artefacts belonging to a New York mob boss Jack Lupino, noting how Lupino was convinced that the current winter was Ragnarök, the end of the world. To this Payne thought that "after Y2K the end of the world had become a cliché, there were only personal apocalypses."
• Palladium Books published a role playing game, Systems Failure, in 1999. Set after the millennium, it describes a scenario in which the Y2K glitch allows insectoid aliens to exploit the worldwide energy hiccup in order to invade Earth en masse.
• In the 3 minutes long anime DiGi Charat, the intro correctly translated says "More important than the Y2K problem is your own dream".
• The rap group Public Enemy did a song titled "Crash" which references the Y2K bug and the problems that it would've caused.
• Heavy metal band Queensrÿche named their 1999 album release Q2K as an obvious reference to Y2K.
• In Everworld, one character raises concerns over the possibility of gods forming dangerous cults in the "real world," mentioning that Y2K had "brought out of the woodwork" many people well-suited for cults.
• In the season 3, episode 3 of the television series Millennium a spree killing at a US High School is linked to a plot by technology millionaires to survive the fallout from the millennium bug and consequent collapse of civilised society.
• A commercial for Sportscenter spoofed the Y2K panic. In the commercial, a Y2K compliance test is run, creating instant chaos as soon as it is activated. Mark McGwire is seen smashing a computer with a baseball bat.
• The Firesign Theatre's 1998 album Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death makes numerous references to Y2K, associating it with the Apocalypse and a vast conspiracy involving men in "eyeball hats."
• The Friends episode "The One with the Routine" (first aired December 16, 1999) featured Joey Tribbiani, Janine, Monica Geller and Ross Geller dancing in one of the pre-taped segments of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. After the end of the party, at Joey's apartment, Joey makes a reference to the Y2K Bug when he says to Janine: "Home sweet home, huh? Nice to, uh, get back to reality. Plus we know how the New Year’s gonna go off. I guess there’s no reason for all that Y2K panic, y’know? Anyway, g’night!"
• *In response to the Y2K hype, a cartoon based on The Godzilla Power Hour was created where they were fighting the Y2K bug (who claims he prefers millennium bug). The bug's appearance renders their Godzilla caller useless. It is implied that they forgot to "update the embedded computer chips".
• In a 2000 Dead Ringers radio sketch, then England cricket captain Nasser Hussain blames the team's bad results on the Millennium Bug.
• A Nike advertisement, directed by Spike Jonze, parodied a worst-case scenario of the Y2K bug. The advertisement featured a jogger who wakes up on New Year's Day, 2000, encountering technological malfunction and civil disorder around him, but not letting it get in the way of his run. http://youtube.com/watch?v=WhF7dQl4Ico
• Will Smith created an album called Willennium that was released in 1999. The Album included the track "Will 2K", which is a song about New Years Eve on December 31, 1999, and it slightly pokes fun at the hype surrounding Y2K.
• Country music singer Chad Brock released a rewrite of Hank Williams, Jr.'s signature song "A Country Boy Can Survive" in late 1999. The rewrite, dubbed the "Y2K Version", featured such lyrics as "If the bank machines crash, we'll be just fine" and "You can't stomp us out, you can't make us run / 'Cause we'll survive the new millennium". Hank Jr. and George Jones appeared as guest vocalists.
• The band "The Prophets Of Regret" made a hit song called Y2K.
• Cky's second film is entitled CKY2K
• New Zealand band The Feelers' first album, Supersystem, jokingly claimed on the cover that it was Y2K Compatible
• The British television series Dark Ages parodied Y2K by portraying a medieval village in similar hysteria in the years 999/1000.
• In the British comedy television series, "Gimme, Gimme, Gimme!", there is a Millenium special episode (simply entitled, "Millenium" or "Millenium Special" on some networks). Halfway through the episode, Tom talks about how him and Linda are in their flat alone while they should be out celebrating the Millenium. After, he makes a reference to the YK2 panic by saying, "Will the Millenium Bug really happen, hm? I mean, WILL computer systems really crash all over the world?"

See also

• ISO 8601
• Year 1900 problem
• Year 2007 problem
• Year 2038 problem
• Year 2070 problem
• Year 10,000 problem

References

• DeJesus, Edmund X. (1998). "Year 2000 Survival Guide". BYTE, July 1998, vol. 23, no. 7 (the final issue of BYTE).
• Gaiman, Neil (2002). Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. London: Titan. ISBN 1-84023-501-2.
• International Y2K Cooperation Center (2000). "Y2K: Starting the Century Right"http://www.governmentfutures.com/documents/Y2KStartingtheCenturyRight-Feb2000.pdfPDF (309 KiB) (Final Report), February 2000.
• Keogh, Jim (1998). "Working to Solve the Year 2000 Problem". Ch. 12 (pp. 307–329) of COBOL Programmer's Notebook. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall PTR. ISBN 0-13-977414-9.
• Slavin, Lois (2002). Y2K readiness helped New York after 9/11 MIT News, 20 November 2002 http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/terror-1120.html (Engineering Systems Division MIT)

External links

• BBC: Y2K coverage
• Y2K Compliance Checker by RJL Software
• The Surprising Legacy Of Y2K – Radio documentary by American Public Media, on the history and legacy of the millennium bug five years on.
• CBC Digital Archives - The Eve of the Millennium