How and why did people get so worried about Y2K when it turned out to be a dud?
Y2K was something that caused a massive freakout in the business world and the media, but it didn't turn out to be a particularly big deal in the real world. How did this panic happen? Who started and spread it? This is not a question about the mechanics of Y2K and why it didn't work, but more from someone who remembers being on Wall Street at the time and there being so much talk about "Y2K readiness" and what have you and making trades based upon Y2K, but it actually didn't really affect anything to the level of driving major financial or equity moves after the event.
Posted Jan 30, 2023, 7:19 PM UTC
05
The impact in terms of problems directly caused by Y2K bugs was minor because so much effort went into trying to prevent them. Some problems did still occur, even in systems that had been thoroughly checked, such as nuclear power plants (15 nuclear power plants had problems, but since people were watching for problems, these were dealt with).
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/abcfl9/why_did_y2k_kill_my_digital_watch_but_nothing_else/
There was some quite legitimate concern. For example, a February 1999 report by The United States Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem noted that
and
Essentially, the extreme predictions of doom were just that: extreme predictions, and far from likely to occur. However, unless potential problems were fixed before 2000, there could be major disruptions in business, especially in banking, insurance, and anything else heavily dependent on data and data processing. There was potential for deaths to occur, such as with medical equipment that calculated radiotherapy doses based on the patient's age, calculated from their birthdate.
There was, however, some deliberate sowing of fear, which caused, at least among some people, a high level of anxiety and fear. Prominent among these fear-mongers were 4 groups, who appear to have done it for profit. First, some writers wrote fear-mongering books. They appear to have taken this stance in their books simply to sell more copies - fear and controversy sell.
Second, and closely related to the first, a significant amount of tabloid journalism, both print and TV, deliberately took a fear-mongering stance. This was nothing special - it's a common tactic to increase the number of readers/viewers. For example, "Are the chemicals in your <foo> killing you? Tune in tomorrow at 5 to find out!"
Third, a variety of fringe groups appear to have deliberately exploited Y2K concerns/fears to increase their membership. This includes survivalist groups and religious cults (e.g., the end-of-the-world is nigh Christian groups, and also other cults).
Despite such deliberate fear-mongering, there wasn't any widespread panic. There was widespread concern, which is a much more reasonable response than widespread panic. There was certainly potential for significant disruption to society, so concern was, as already said, reasonable. The extreme doom predictions about the almost-certain collapse of society and the fall of civilisation as we know it were, quite frankly, ridiculous. Ridiculous, but some people still believed it (unsurprising, IMO, since we live in a world where some people believe that food heated/cooked in a microwave oven becomes radioactice), and "panic" is a fair description of the response of some of them.
References and further reading:
The United States Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem, Investigating the Impact of the Year 2000 Problem, S. Prt. 106-10, 1999: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CPRT-106sprt10/pdf/GPO-CPRT-106sprt10.pdf
More on Y2K scare-books: https://www.fastcompany.com/90439521/the-weird-wonderful-world-of-y2k-survival-guides-a-look-back
As an example, my mother who was head of one of the city's IT departments started working on it in 1996 as part of a city wide task force.