The Hoax of the Century?

The Y2K problem is the electronic equivalent of the El Niño and there will be nasty surprises around the globe.

John Hamre
United States Deputy Secretary of Defense


If – like Honestly Lay Bare – you were involved in either risk management or internal audit ten years ago, one can say with certainty that in July 1999 you, your organisation, your shareholders and your regulators were focused on one key risk – what was then known as the Year 2000 problem.

The Year 2000 problem (also known as the Y2K problem, the millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or simply Y2K) was a computer bug resulting from the practice in early computer program design of representing the year with two digits.

This time code ambiguity caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after January 1, 2000 and on other critical dates which were billed event horizons. Without corrective action, long-working systems would break down when the "...97, 98, 99..." ascending numbering assumption suddenly became invalid. Companies and organizations world-wide checked, fixed, and upgraded their computer systems.

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.

The acronym Y2K has been attributed to David Eddy, a Massachusetts programmer. He later said, "People were calling it CDC (Century Date Change) and FADL (Faulty Date Logic)”.

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.

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Two very different approaches were used to solve the Year 2000 problem in legacy systems:

• Date expansion: 2-digit years were expanded to include the century (becoming 4-digit years) in programs, files and databases. This was considered the "purest" solution, resulting in unambiguous dates that are permanent and easy to maintain. However, this method was costly, requiring massive testing and conversion efforts, and usually affecting entire systems.

• Windowing: 2-digit years were retained, and programs determined the century value only when needed for particular functions, such as date comparisons and calculations. This technique, which required installing small patches of code into programs, was simpler to test and implement than date expansion, thus much less costly. While not a permanent solution, windowing fixes were usually designed to work for several decades. This was thought acceptable, as older legacy systems eventually get replaced by newer technology.

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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 technological glitches occur on a regular basis.

Reported problems include:

• In Ishikawa, Japan, radiation-monitoring equipment failed at midnight, but officials said there was no risk to the public.

• In Onagawa, Japan, an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant at two minutes after midnight.

• 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.

• In Australia, bus-ticket-validation machines in two states failed to operate.

• In the United States, 150 slot machines at race tracks in Delaware stopped working.

• 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”.

• 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".

As the new year dawned, questions began to be asked whether all the effort had been worthwhile and whether the ‘fix on failure’ approach rather than the remediation approach would have been the most efficient and cost effective way to solve the problem.

The Wall Street Journal a number of years later editorialized that it was an “end-of-the-world cult and the hoax of the century.”

This view was supported by:

• 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".

• The lack of Y2K-related problems in an estimated 1.5 million small businesses that undertook no remediation effort. On 3 January 2000 (the first weekday of the year) the Small Business Administration received an estimated 40 calls from businesses with computer problems, similar to the average. None of the problems were critical.

• 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, 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. None of these countries experienced any Y2K problems regarded as worth reporting.

• 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. 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 severely overestimated.

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On New Year’s Eve 1999, Honestly Lay Bare and the future Mrs Honestly Lay Bare found themselves at a party in a high rise apartment on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia.

For those of you that know the area you will know that on a clear night when one is at that height you can see into the neighboring state, New South Wales.

Due to the fact that New South Wales observes day light saving and Queensland didn’t in 1999 (and still doesn’t) we were in the fortunate position to be able see 2000 be ushered in in New South Wales an hour ahead of it being observed in Queensland.

As midnight passed in New South Wales we were able to see the lights stay on (and the fireworks explode) and about a minute past twelve (NSW time) we saw a plane fly past into Queensland airspace.

It was at that moment that we were thankful that we hadn’t done the sacrificial act of offering to be at work come the turn of the New Year.

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Perhaps though Honestly Lay Bare was most blessed by having an “insightful” boss at the time.

The boss was clearly a student of the Gregorian Calendar as he held the view that the “Millennium Bug” was coming a year too early as the first year of the 21st century and the third millennium occurred in the year 2001 not the year 2000 because the first century began with the year AD1 (there was no year zero).

For Honestly Lay Bare’s then boss – well … he had another year to fix the problem after everyone else!