In case you’re of millennial age or older (or should you’ve seen a sure comedy-horror movie now in theaters), you’re probably already acquainted with the “yr 2000 downside,” higher identified by the moniker Y2K. In any case, it was virtually all of the information media might speak about in 1999.
The yr 2000 downside was that many early pc packages saved reminiscence by abbreviating years to 2 digits. And within the days main as much as the brand new millennium, the priority was that computer systems wouldn’t know to interpret “00” as “2000” and would then fail, inflicting widespread outages in sectors like banking, communications, utilities, and the federal government.
Merely put, many feared January 1, 2000, would carry mass chaos.
The information media rabidly coated — and, arguably, contributed to — the panic. “It was a media firestorm,” former New York Instances tech columnist David Pogue recalled in a 2023 CBS Information New York interview. “Reporters didn’t know if it was actual or not.”
Tv information contributed to Y2K fears, usually operating options on survivalists who had been unplugging and isolating from society within the run-up to the brand new yr. CNN even supplied a Y2K “preparedness guidelines” that suggested stocking up on meals and water as one would in preparation for a pure catastrophe.
“There was a smorgasbord of Y2K on TV. It was a spectacle ready-made for community information protection, one of many final hurrahs for a medium that may quickly be decimated by computer systems — which is possibly why the information coated them with such concern,” Dan Piepenbring wrote in an n+1 evaluate of the documentary Time Bomb Y2K.
In that documentary, now streaming on Max, administrators Brian Becker and Marley McDonald cowl the hysteria across the yr 2000 downside. For Becker, realizing he hadn’t heard about Y2K “led to additional analysis and realizing it was on TV basically each evening for 2 years,” he advised Filmmaker Journal.
Because the pivotal Y2K second drew nearer, TV information divisions devoted dozens of hours of airtime to New Yr’s Eve. CNN deliberate 100 consecutive hours of protection, whereas MSNBC slated a less-intense 30-hour block, together with an early-morning TV broadcast by which Brian Williams and Soledad O’Brien would “allow us to all know whether or not the world continues to be standing,” as The Washington Publish’s Lisa de Moraes quipped.
Nervousness turned to reduction on January 1, 2000, as doomsday by no means got here. Some glitches had been reported, however suffice it to say, stories of the world’s finish had been enormously exaggerated. Planes didn’t fall out of the sky, nuclear reactors didn’t shut down, and cardiac pacemakers stored ticking.
As an alternative, TV viewers noticed “Sydney lit up, Paris aglow, Berlin bedazzled, and seven,000 tv reporters attempting to think about one thing to say amid their 24-hour protection of nothing,” as The Journal Instances’ Rob Golub put it.
Even earlier than the clock struck midnight on January 1, a Chicago Tribune ballot discovered that nearly half of these surveyed believed the media had gone too far or exaggerated the protection of Y2K. “We often shoot one another seems to be when it comes up in a newscast,” one lady advised the newspaper. “The most important dialogue my husband and I’ve has been how that is getting out of hand.”
And after the anticlimactic New Yr, Y2K grew to become a punchline for some, whereas others thought-about it a hoax. In a letter to the editor of the St. Petersburg Instances, one reader chided the media, and TV information particularly, for crying wolf. “An abject apology is due for spreading all of the Y2K panic that prompted at the least some folks to anticipate the worst when, in actual fact, completely nothing occurred,” that reader wrote. “Each native and nationwide TV information operations even had some tales that had the theme ‘In case you’re not apprehensive about Y2K, try to be.’ This irresponsible rubbish was fed to the general public evening and day for a number of months.”
Behind the scenes, nonetheless, corporations had spent thousands and thousands and programmers had labored for years to make programs Y2K-compliant. “The Y2K disaster didn’t occur exactly as a result of folks began making ready for it over a decade prematurely. And most of the people who was busy stocking up on provides and stuff simply didn’t have a way that the programmers had been on the job,” Paul Saffo, a futurist and adjunct professor at Stanford College, advised TIME in 2019.
In case you missed the Y2K panic, you get an encore efficiency within the years forward. Know-how now has a yr 2038 downside, and alarmist protection has already begun.