The Year 2000 Crisis

"Due to an arcane glitch, most of the world's computers will reset themselves to 1900 when the year 2000 rolls around. The problem seems harmless enough, but the results could be devastating: Social Security and Medicare payments might grind to a halt, satellites could go cross-eyed, and long-distance telephone connections could get snarled." — Philadelphia Inquirer, 1996

"It is possible, in the light of the enormous scale and range of financial market participants, that certain applications may fail to operate smoothly on 1st January 2000."— Bank for International Settlements, 1997-09-08

"The Year 2000 issue ... carries tremendous risks of disruption in the operations of financial institutions and in financial markets." — Bank for International Settlements, 1997-11-18

"Most worrisome, because of their vast potential for destruction, are the world's nuclear weapons arsenals and nuclear power plants. For if the network of interconnected systems collapses and cascades into systemic infrastructure failures, power and communications could be lost worldwide. Restoration may be delayed or even impossible in a world where everything else has snapped to a halt. In the chaos and confusion that would follow no one knows what would happen to nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors. In the truly worst-case scenario, accidental nuclear war and/or reactor meltdowns could release enough deadly radioactivity to return the planet to the insects." — THE 'NIGHTMARE SCENARIO', The Nation, 1999-03-15

Y2K Documents on this Site

Since there was no meltdown on January 1, 2000, some people believe that there was never any danger. But in fact the danger was averted by thousands of low-level programmers (mostly in India) who laboriously examined many thousands of programs (many written in COBOL) and who fixed the code where necessary.

On the question of whether February 2000 has a 29th day see:

See also:

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