'Largest IT Outage in History' Sparks Global Chaos.
'Largest IT Outage in History' Sparks Global Chaos.
"This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it's actually happened this time."
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"This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it's actually happened this time."
What people were worried about with Y2K was nuclear weapons being launched and planes falling out of the sky. And it was nonsense, but bad things could have happened.
The good part is that the harm was mitigated for the most part through due diligence of IT workers.
This is similar to what would have actually happened if not for the dilligence of IT workers fixing the Y2K code issues globally. Uninformed people were worried about missiles and apocalyptic violence, but IT workers withdrew some cash and made sure not to have travel plans.
The difference here is that this was caused by massive and widespread negligence. Every company affected had poor IT infrastructure architecture. Falcon Sensor is one product installed on Windows servers. Updates should go to test environments prior to being pushed to production environments. Dollars to donuts, all of the companies that were not affected had incompetent management or cheap budgets.
Millions of man hours spent making sure Y2K didn't cause problems and the only recognition they got was the movie Office Space.
There isn't a single one of them who was working at that time I have spoken with who didn't think Office Space was exactly the correct tribute
I'll take it. I identified so hard with that movie. When I eventually die, I'll do so knowing I've been seen.
I wonder if there would be any way to work it so that a dry concept like that could be made into a decent movie based on the actual events. They did it for Tetris.
Sure, but even the worst Y2K effects wouldn't have had what lots of people were worried about, which was basically the apocalypse.
People who really should have known better were telling me that Y2K would launch the missiles in the silos.
We knew. However we knew there would be problems so we emphasized extremely unlikely scenarios to get the budgets to prevent the really annoying shit that might've happened.
We rarely disagree, but I’m gonna pull the “I work in the industry” card on you. A lot of hardworking people prevented bad things from happening whether big or small. We only look back at it as overblown because of them.
Are you really going to claim that we would have had a global thermonuclear armageddon if Y2K mitigation was a failure?
You're focusing on the extreme unrealistic end of what people were worried about with Y2K, but the realistic range of concerns got really high up there too. There were realistic concerns about national power grids going offline and not being easily fixable, for example.
The huge amount of work and worry that went into Y2K was entirely justified, and trying to blow it off as "people were worried about nuclear armageddon, weren't they silly" is misrepresenting the seriousness of the situation.
I literally said in my first comment:
The good part is that the harm was mitigated for the most part through due diligence of IT workers.
What more should I have said?
It's not what more you should have said, but what less. It's the "people were worried about nuclear armageddon" thing that's the problem here. You're making it look like the concerns about Y2K were overblown and silly.
Well you're welcome to think that, but that wasn't what I was talking about. I was talking about what people were actually worried about rather than what the person claimed people were worried about.
I literally quoted what I was responding to, so I have no idea why you're taking that away from what I said that I was suggesting Y2K wasn't a big deal when I wasn't even discussing the reality of the situation.
No. I'm saying that something like today would have happened only it would have been much worse in that it couldn't be fixed in the space of hours / days.
Sure, but that's not what people were worrying about at the time, which was my point.
Y2K wasn't nonsense. It was unremarkable, ultimately, because of the efforts taken to avoid it for a decade.
20 Years Later, the Y2K Bug Seems Like a Joke—Because Those Behind the Scenes Took It Seriously
President Clinton had exhorted the government in mid-1998 to “put our own house in order,” and large businesses — spurred by their own testing — responded in kind, racking up an estimated expenditure of $100 billion in the United States alone. Their preparations encompassed extensive coordination on a national and local level, as well as on a global scale, with other digitally reliant nations examining their own systems.
“The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance. And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have a sense that the programmers were on the job,” says Paul Saffo, a futurist and adjunct professor at Stanford University.What is worth noting about this event is how public concern grows and reacts out of ignorance. Just because a pending catastrophe results in something 'less-than' does not mean best efforts weren't taken to avoid it. Just because something isn't as bad as it could have been doesn't mean it was a hoax (see: covid19). Additionally, just because something turns out to be a grave concern doesn't mean best efforts didn't mitigate what could have been far worse (see: inflation).
After the collective sigh of relief in the first few days of January 2000, however, Y2K morphed into a punch line, as relief gave way to derision — as is so often the case when warnings appear unnecessary after they are heeded. It was called a big hoax; the effort to fix it a waste of time.
Written in 2019 about an event in 1999, it's apparent to me that not much has changed. We're doomed to repeat history even provided with the most advanced technology the world has ever known to pull up the full report of history in the palm of our hands.
The inherent conundrum of the
Y2K[insert current event here] debate is that those on both ends of the spectrum — from naysayers to doomsayers — can claim that the outcome proved their predictions correct.I never said it was nonsense. I said what a lot of people were worried about was nonsense- stuff like it causing nuclear armageddon or crashing the global economy.
And this event today isn't even what IT professionals were worried about. This is a big headache for them and a day off for a lot of other people. It's not going to do the damage Y2K would have done had people not done enough.
One exception to that is the UK's NHS. I feel like having IT outages for an entire countries nationalized health service could probably lead to some preventable death. Though I imagine they hopefully have paper backups for the most important shit.
Real life Armageddon: Bruce Willis & crew return home and are greeted by boos and protestors with "waste of taxpayer money" signs. Can you imagine...
The United States would never send a crew up to stop an asteroid. If it's a Dem president, SCOTUS would block it. If it's Donald, he'd claim the asteroid is fake news and a Dem hoax, then the scoundrels in the House and Senate would obstruct any action via their little bunkers.