When the lights went out, and the shooting started, Y2K started to feel all too real
- Reference: 1766993171
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/12/29/on_call/
- Source link:
Let's start with a reader we'll Regomize as "Graham" who at the time worked at a cable television network operated by a giant US telco.
Midnight passed without incident for Graham, but at 0010 an actual manifestation of the Y2K bug appeared.
[1]
"There was a problem with an old character generator that used an 80286 processor," Graham wrote. "The clock had stopped at midnight and the machine just froze."
[2]
[3]
Graham and his team spent months preparing for Y2K and sprang into action, then relaxed again when the borked box resumed operations after a simple reboot.
But then came a truly odd incident.
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"One interesting and unanticipated problem was people shooting weapons," Graham told on Call. "In at least one case a merrymaker shot a distribution amplifier, knocking out cable for their neighbors. There was some discussion as to whether to include the outage on the Y2K dashboard or not."
The lights went out and I feared the worst
Now let's meet another reader we'll call "Kerry" who worked for a University that ordered all computers machines be turned off for Y2K eve.
Kerry's job saw him manage a fleet of Unix servers, and he decided to ignore that instruction.
"I was confident that nothing serious would go wrong and that my users could continue to work from home," he told On Call.
Kerry therefore went home and prepared for the millennium eve party he intended to host.
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"At around 4pm everything electrical stopped working," he told The Register . "I felt the bottom drop out from under me. Were the doomsday predictions true?"
Spoiler alert: They weren't.
"I quickly found out the out that my neighbors did not have the same problem," Graham told On Call. "The main fuse of my house had blown because we were using way too much power."
And when he returned to work the following week, all was well – other than the banner page on print jobs dated "Monday January 3 1900."
[6]User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis
[7]User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't
[8]Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours
[9]Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down
Worst … prank … ever
Now let's meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rob" who at the time of Y2K worked for Sun Microsystems in the UK.
As a global company, Sun had an early warning system for any Y2K problems: Its Australian office was 11 hours ahead of the UK office, so if any problems struck there, the company would get advance notice.
Which is why, as midnight neared Down Under, Rob's boss called Sun's Sydney office … then heard the phone line go terrifyingly silent as the clock ticked pas midnight. Rob said that "scared the hell out of my manager" – at least for a few moments, because the phone soon rang.
"It was the Australian office, laughing their heads off," Rob told On Call. ®
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/on_call/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/12/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/05/on_call/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/28/on_call/
[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"Worst prank ever"?
>at least for a few moments, because the phone soon rang.
"It was the Australian office, laughing their heads off..."
Ah, what they should have done, instead of just hanging up the phone at local midnight, is babble something incoherent about "my god... the koalas... wallabies... they've got machetes... oh the humanity... oh nooooo, the 'roos have taken Clyde..."
And then hung up the phone.
My y2k horror story.
I sat in a lonely office in Redwood City for a couple hours before and after midnight, playing with Net Hack[0]. My phone didn't ring once. As expected.
The cold, hard reality is that I and several hundred thousand (a couple million? Dunno.) other computer people worked on "the Y2K problem" for well over 20 years, on and off. Come the morning of January 1st, 2000 damn near everything worked as intended ... thus causing brilliant minds to conclude that it was never a problem to begin with.
HOWever, in the 2 years leading up to 2000, I got paid an awful lot of money re-certifying stuff that I had already certified to be Y2K compliant some 10-20 years earlier. Same for the embedded guys & gals. By the time 2000 came around, most of the hard work was close to a decade in the past ... the re-certification was pure management bullshit, so they could be seen as doing something ... anything! ... useful during the beginning of the dot-bomb bubble bursting.
[0] Not playing the game, rather playing with the game. Specifically modifying the source to add some stuff for a friend.
I worked for a certain UK Satellite company. For Y2K they hired 8 VERY VERY expensive suits with no technical ability.
They sat there from 30th December to 2nd Jan being paid insane amounts (think world's top lawyers and then some). They had no technical ability OR access but were purely in place to draft PR fluff pieces "just in case" the TV satellites decided to hurl themselves from space on a death trajectory towards the UK.
Company spooged over £16 million on these guys, but refused to update their ticketing/support system, TV Box firmware etc etc.