We were warned that our embrace of computer technology would lead to disaster.
By incorporating computers into ever more areas of our lives, we were told, we had created a scenario in which a mundane glitch could bring everything crashing down. Air travel would be snarled, bank accounts would become inaccessible, essential services would be seriously disrupted, and people would stare in horror as the computers they relied on for so much simply stopped working.
These warnings applied not to last week’s CrowdStrike IT outages, but to the year 2000 computer problem (Y2K), when experts warned that a disaster would unfold when 1999 became 2000 unless precautions were taken.
The events that played out on July 19, 2024, when a faulty software update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused widespread outages for users of Microsoft Windows, seemed to be a replay of the failures anticipated in the Year 2000. Even as CrowdStrike rushed to fix the problem, air travel was grounded, many people struggled to access their bank accounts, essential services genuinely were disrupted, and many people felt themselves turning red as they stared at their computers’ “blue screen of death.”
There are key differences between today’s CrowdStrike outage and the scenario warned about in Y2K. But there are significant parallels too. The most important may be what the CrowdStrike outage reveals about what we have failed to learn from Y2K itself: the computer systems on which we depend are fragile and error prone—and these systems are so interwoven in our daily lives that, when disaster strikes, it can hit us everywhere at once.
The Y2K problem is now nearly ancient history. In the 1950s and '60s, computer memory was expensive, and computer professionals were under pressure to save money. One solution they hit on was to truncate dates, lopping off the century digits so that 1939 would be coded as 39. To be clear, this worked. It saved memory, it saved money, and it did not impact the calculations computers used dates to make. Simply put: 1999 minus 1939 equals 60, and 99 minus 39 also equals 60. However, 2000 minus 1939 equals 61, but 00 minus 39 equals -39. And when computers encountered these incorrect results some systems and programs would start churning out garbage data, while others would fail entirely.
It turned out that straightforward programming decisions taken in the moment could have long-lasting, potentially calamitous implications—especially when so many people and systems came to rely on those underlying programs.