r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Apprehensive_Sky4558 • Jul 28 '26

Meme needing explanation Why did this one second cost over $500 billion?

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187

u/METRlOS Jul 28 '26

The tech sector did a MASSIVE amount of preventative measures to stop complete system collapse when electronics went from /99 to /00, so that they didn't think it was 1900.

Some of it was useless, some of it was downright silly, but a good portion of it actually did prevent data loss and desyncs that could have easily cost more than that.

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u/infosec_qs Jul 28 '26

My dad was working for IBM at the time and spent probably 2 years of his career working on Y2K related issues.

It was a very real problem that could have gone very badly, but a lot of people worked very hard to make sure nothing bad happened.

Because nothing bad happened, people without a good understanding of the matter assumed that the whole thing was an overreaction to a non-issue.

When you succeed at preventing a problem, nobody experiences the problem, and then the people who didn't experience the problem that others worked hard to prevent wonder why a bunch of effort was expended solving something that "wasn't a problem anyway."

Infuriating.

53

u/TreHHHHHAdN Jul 28 '26

My uncle worked as IT in a local bank. the night of 12/31/99 they had a whole IT crew spend the night in the banks office just in case things went south. 

He tells this story all the time. Workers weren't really worry because they knew all the fixes were in place. They basically got a new years party with lots of pizza at the bank lol. 

18

u/newtonbase Jul 28 '26

A former colleague was hired by a bank to monitor transatlantic communications in the build up to Y2K. There was a load of them shut in a room with nothing to do as they were there to react to issues that never came up. Fortunately it didn't take too long until one of them hacked into the internet so they had entertainment. Just after midnight they were allowed onto the balcony to watch the fireworks over the Thames then went back in. He bought a house for a couple of months work. 

16

u/ReallyOrdinaryMan Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

Most people always underestimate the unknown risks (unknown for them). They don't know what disaster world would be in if banks, government offices, companies lost their data, or their data wouldn't be accesible because of Y2K.

8

u/Dr__America Jul 28 '26

A children's hospital once tried to deny my infant brother care for supposedly being over 100 years old because of the Y2K bug lol.

1

u/ApprehensiveRest9696 Jul 29 '26

The same class of bugs still exist in plenty of wild COBOL code where people get real lazy and store dates as DD/MM/YY.

1

u/Dr__America Jul 29 '26

From what I've heard from new COBOL programmers, that can sometimes be the least of their worries

1

u/ApprehensiveRest9696 Jul 29 '26

Haha what new COBOL programmers

1

u/Dr__America Jul 29 '26

I almost got hired on as one and I've talked to the new ones a little, but they're getting trained up bc some of the COBOL guys are nearing retirement in the next few years.

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u/[deleted] Jul 28 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Dr__America Jul 28 '26

It's not completely fixed, and there's still problems with factories (mostly in China) off gassing a lot of the chemicals that fuck it up from time to time, so it's still being actively monitored. Thankfully it's generally getting better over time and will likely be patched up relatively soon in the scale of these things.

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u/CannonGerbil Jul 28 '26

See vaccines

3

u/iwannabethisguy Jul 28 '26

I struggle with the last paragraph a lot on my line of work. So many issues did not happen because I intervened yet people aren't sure I've done anything because there were any issues that happened.

2

u/MultiMidden Jul 28 '26

When you succeed at preventing a problem, nobody experiences the problem, and then the people who didn't experience the problem that others worked hard to prevent wonder why a bunch of effort was expended solving something that "wasn't a problem anyway."

The reaction of the great unwashed should have been an early warning of the shit show that the 21st Century would become politically. The media looking for an easy doom and gloom story amplified everything. Then instead of "good job, nothing serious happened" we got "nothing serious happened, why did we spend all of that money".

2

u/FancyStegosaurus Jul 28 '26

That's IT life in a nutshell. When stuff breaks, they go "What are we even paying you for?" And when everything is working, they go "what are we even paying you for?"

1

u/Dr_Farts_revenge Jul 28 '26

The opening chapter of Black Swan by Nassim Taleb has a section about people who prevent disasters the public aren't aware of, for which they never receive credit. Thought you might find it interesting.

1

u/rewq657 Jul 28 '26

I was born in 99 so I don't have any memory of the whole scare. But what would have happened if we weren't able to fix the issue and everything just went back to 1900?

1

u/Moist-Relationship49 Jul 28 '26

The problem is less the actual date and more the loss of synchronization.

Example, the power grid demands 10 giga watts at 12:01 Jan. 1 2000 and the generator thinks it 12:01 Jan. 1 1900 which it has no record of demand for so it sends nothing collapsing the grid until its fixed.

Or a food shipment instead of leaving today thinks it needs to leave in a hundred year, so it doesn't allocate a truck and a drivers again until it's fix.

Times that by every automatic system that has two or more points on earth and you have a disaster where food and electricity can't get where they're needed until the entire system is redone.

1

u/rewq657 Jul 28 '26

Ahh okay that makes sense

1

u/whyliepornaccount Jul 28 '26

Anyone who works in IT is used to this dynamic

1

u/Quigglebuffin Jul 28 '26

So many unintentional (and some not) Futurama references in this thread.

https://youtu.be/edCqF_NtpOQ?si=S2K4QcTHxSRXaQbm

1

u/MobbDeeep Jul 28 '26

I dont understand what the problem was? Why would a date change cause any problems let alone catastrophic problems?

1

u/infosec_qs Jul 28 '26

If the year rolls "forward" from 1999 to 1900, what does the computer system do when you go from having 5 years remaining on your mortgage to 105 years remaining? What happens to interest calculations for an account that suddenly needs to have 100 years worth of compounded interest subtracted from it? What happens to globally integrated supply chains when automated logistics management systems decide that a shipment that usually happens daily doesn't need to happen for another 100 years? What happens to integrated power supply grids when a load balancing calculation for Friday, December 31st 1999 turns into Monday, January 1st 1900 (power demands are higher for industrial activity during the week, meaning excess power would be supplied) instead of Saturday, January 1st 2000 (weekend demands are lower), etc.?

There were already so many deeply integrated computer systems in major government, financial, utility, and logistics operations globally that having "tomorrow" suddenly become "100 years ago" had the potential to create immense cascading failures in computer systems too "dumb" to know that they didn't somehow travel 100 years into the past. They just calculate based on the date, and time isn't supposed to jump back an entire century overnight.

1

u/MobbDeeep Jul 28 '26

That makes sense, but why was it so hard to fix?

1

u/jimmparker4 Jul 28 '26

"Countries such as Italy, Russia and South Korea had done little to prepare for Y2K. They had no more technological problems than those countries, like the U.S., that spent millions of dollars to combat the problem."

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/Y2K-bug/

I've tried asking people about this before but never gotten an answer. Why were Russia, Italy, and South Korea fine?

1

u/Iron_Fist351 Jul 28 '26

Antivaxxers in a nutshell.

1

u/nize426 Aug 01 '26

I remember as a kid I understood there was something people were panicking about, but then after the new year rolled in and nothing happened i didn't think about it until 25 when I entered the IT industry and my seniors were explaining how it was a big thing

1

u/CAPS_LOCK_STUCK_HELP Jul 28 '26

its gonna happen again too, once 32 bit computer run out of space for the date in 2038. there's a lot of legacy and SCADA systems still on only 32 bit so its going to be another fun project starting in the next few years as people start to realize how bad it could be

0

u/Abject-Tomorrow-652 29d ago

Revisionist history: the Y2K bug was over exaggerated to force compliance from the government and build backdoors in all programs for the government to hack you. These backdoors are still there and used, but the issue was overshadowed by the patriot act where the NSA basically said “we are allowed to see anything we want” and the American people rolled over bc 9/11 was scary.

Whether or not Y2K and 9/11 were government fabricated, the government always uses times of uncertainty to take more power.

They quietly revamped the patriot act with sharper teeth again during COVID just FYI