Its been 25 years since the tech industry went into meltdown over the Y2k bug. But exactly how serious did the UK think it was going to be?
The Y2K bug, otherwise known as the millennium problem, was the widespread fear that computers would struggle to be function once the dates had changed to the year 2000.
This is because the calendars on computers were programmed using the latter two of the four digits of a year, and so wouldn’t be able to distinguish between 1900 and 2000. The fact it was a leap year intensified those concerns.
While the whole fiasco seems far-fetched now and has since been labelled by many as a “non-event”, it certainly wasn’t at the time.
The government released a full 50-page report on the problem and set up a Year 2000 Team and an Action 2000 agency to assess the preparedness of the UK for the issues they could face.
Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair said: “[The millennium bug is] one of the most serious problems facing not only British business but the global economy today.
“The Bug was a potential national emergency but Britain has risen to this challenge.”
It wasn’t just governments that were concerned. Several major tech companies in 1999 were putting in place extensive plans to protect themselves from a malfunction.
Many devoted a section of their annual reports to the ‘Year 2000’ in a bid to reassure investors they had contingencies in place to prevent their IT systems from collapsing.
Sky’s Company Secretary in 1999, David Gormley said: “The Group is taking the risk of computer systems malfunction at the turn of the century very seriously”. The British broadcasting giant spent an estimated £11m on its Year 2000 Programme and reported that they had had to modify hardware and software in order to avoid any significant operational disruptions, setting up a senior management response team in case of any issues.
The Cellnet group, now known as O2, also spent a staggering amount on its Millenium Programme, setting up the board-sponsored programme in 1996 and spending an estimated £5m in 1999 alone on it.
Although it was important to the public that telecommunications and broadcasting still worked as they entered the 21st century, major concerns existed worldwide with regards to the defence sector and especially with nuclear power in eastern Europe.
A figure between $200bn and $800bn is thought to have been spent worldwide trying to avoid the worst case scenarios such as planes dropping out the sky or nuclear plants exploding.
The aerospace and defence company BAE Systems spent one of the biggest sums in the UK with an estimated £90m on its Year 2000 programme and introduced a strategy broken down into four elements: products, infrastructure, IT and supply chain.
Company Secretary for BAE Systems in 1999, S P Carroll, said: “Given the complexity of the millennium problem, no programme can guarantee complete Year 2000 compliance.
“The key objective of the plan is to minimise the risk of material business interruption arising from Year 2000 non-compliance.”
A secretary at Vodafone in 2000, S R Scott, said in the Directors’ Report: “The company is giving high priority to the impact of the millennium and is taking significant and positive steps to minimise the effect of the date change issues.”
UK tech giant ARM introduced a seven-stage plan and spent £100,000 on coping with the issue. Arm’s report said: “Even the best run projects will face some Year 2000 compliance failures.
“There can be no assurance that Year 2000 projects will be successful or that the date change from 1999 to 2000 will not adversely affect the company’s operations and financial results.”
The press’ paranoia was evident in the lead up to the turn of the century, with the Guardian calling it a “countdown to chaos.”
With nuclear alerts, survival guides and reassurances that microwaves would still work, the media was frenzied with stories full of scary predictions and forecasts.
One of which was water companies predicting that fears of being unable to get water would lead to customers filling baths and basins with water the day before.
A similar fear hit HSBC customers who queued up in their thousands to get cash out of their bank accounts, with at least 10,000 machines being unable to process transactions a few days before New Year’s Eve.
The BBC even called for the need of an “IT army to prevent ‘digital doomsday.’”
Of course, in the end none of these companies were affected and everything operated with business as usual, at least until 2008’s financial crisis.
In fact, the only significant impact of the Y2K bug in the UK was in the NHS when 154 pregnant women were given incorrect Down’s syndrome tests which lead to two abortions.
However, Peter De Jager who wrote the infamous Doomsday 2000 article, believes the expensive paranoia of big companies is what prevented many serious incidents occurring.
He said: “It forced competent managers round the globe to examine their systems with the single-minded goal of answering a simple question: did this thing called Y2K pose a threat to their computer systems?”
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