This weekend, SNL alum Kyle Mooney’s directorial debut Y2K hit theaters, and both its Gen Z cast and younger audiences watching it may be surprised to learn the absurd premise is based on a real event. The story, set in 1999, revolves around two high school nobodies, Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison), who decide to live a little and go to a New Year’s Eve house party thrown by cute classmate Laura (Rachel Zegler). However, when midnight arrives, all hell breaks loose as the technology in the house goes haywire and turns murderous.
The premise is a fun one, a Maximum Overdrive-type scenario where technology turns sentient and starts to kill. Of course, it could never happen in real life (though with tech bros pushing A.I. nonstop, who knows), but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t real panic almost 25 years ago as the world was on the cusp of the year 2000 and the new millennium. Considering none of the actors in the main cast of Y2K were even alive then, I’m sure it was a fun time on set trying to explain to them the feeling of that time.
Y2K Was A Real 1999 Panic That Involved Computers
If anything, Y2K was the first time the world realized that our growing reliance on technology, specifically computers, could be a real global weakness. We also realized that the event that might bring the world down wouldn’t be a nuclear war or a meteor, but a dumb coding oversight – truly. See, back then, most computer programs had been programmed so that, in coding, the year in their dates only used two digits instead of four, i.e. 99 instead of 1999. Programmers soon realized that was a problem as we got to the end of the millennium – there was a chance that various computer programs around the world that relied on specific dates and times would read the new date as 1900 rather than 2000 when midnight struck and the date rolled over to the new year.
Does that seem silly now? Sure. Of course. But back then, it wasn’t – when these programs had been coded, no one was thinking about the new millennium. Major systems relied on their computer software being accurate down to the second – think banking and stocks, communications, government, the military, travel & aviation, insurance, and more. All those industries, both within countries and globally, relied on these programs that may or may not become obsolete once the clock rolled over.
How The World Prepared For Y2K
The general consensus by experts was that nothing would happen – probably. But when you’re talking about a potential global scenario where planes could fall out of the sky, banking systems could crash, and communication systems would go down, “probably” isn’t good enough. That is not a great time for something to be a non-zero chance. While experts and coders thought the chance was smaller than bigger, they still took it very seriously.
For over a year, and especially in the months leading up to New Year’s Eve, computer programmers around the world raced to patch fixes in software, the most common one being to simply expand the year date to a four-digit number rather than a two-digit one. Companies threw millions at IT technicians and computer programmers, feverishly working on fixes to shore up any potential crashes. Computers being so ubiquitous and the new global economy were relatively new developments, though, and no one was entirely sure what would happen, even after those patches.
Again, it seems silly now, but you have to understand that the span of time between the Y2K panic and today is the same length of time between the Y2k panic and 1975. Take a moment to think about what the world was like in 1975. No one had cell phones and very few people had computers; even by 2000, only about half the households in the United States had personal computers. Coding and programming, as professions, were still niche industries. The world was, quite literally, in uncharted technological territory. All everyone could do was cross their fingers and wait.
What Really Happened When The Clock Struck Midnight In 2000
In the end, nothing significant happened when the clock struck midnight on 2000, though it would be incorrect to say nothing happened. Glitches did happen. The main sectors impacted were credit card companies, which experienced non-isolated billion system issues. Of far greater concern was that a few nuclear plants experienced some genuinely alarming computer glitches. Those issues, however, were fixed relatively quickly and no real harm came of it. In the end, the Y2K bug was a perfect example of widespread disaster being averted because the world took it seriously and the experts in that field worked to avert the crisis before it even happened. Like the vibe of the ’90s-set movie, it’s a sadly quaint notion today.
