Life | Fads | 00s | 90s

Remember When Y2K Was Going To Kill Us All?

Who was alive in the year 1999? Well, if you were, surely you remember the whole Y2K craziness that happened. It was absolute mayhem. Everywhere you looked people were preparing for the inevitable crash of all technology because a computer bug would cause everything to think it was back in the year 1900 instead of 2000.

The panic was pretty insane. People were terrified that all their computers would stop working and went as far as secluding themselves in bunkers to stay safe. Time magazine even set up a generator powered "war room" in case they needed to break the news after all the electricity went out. They even published a magazine with the headline "The End of the World!?!" which probably didn't help the whole fear-mongering even though the article actually concluded that there probably wasn't much to worry about.

"Y2K" (which stood for Year two thousand if you didn't remember) became a concern in 1998 when computer experts realized that by using only the two final digits of the year in their programming that the year "00" would cause absolute chaos and destroy all the equations and formatting. They also found out that computers weren't recognizing the year 2000 as a leap year.

A few solutions were put in place to try and stop any damage, which turned out to be very minimal. On the whole, nothing happened that wasn't immediately fixed. There were reports that some radiation alarms went off in Japan but they were found to be false alarms, a bus ticket machine stopped working and a couple websites dates changes to Jan 1, 19100.

It was a whole lot of hype for nothing, and people felt a bit silly for it. Luckily we had a lot of goofy comics to make fun of the whole thing.