This isn’t a gloat post. In fact, I was completely oblivious to this massive outage until I tried to check my bank balance and it wouldn’t log in.
Apparently Visa Paywave, banks, some TV networks, EFTPOS, etc. have gone down. Flights have had to be cancelled as some airlines systems have also gone down. Gas stations and public transport systems inoperable. As well as numerous Windows systems and Microsoft services affected. (At least according to one of my local MSMs.)
Seems insane to me that one company’s messed up update could cause so much global disruption and so many systems gone down :/ This is exactly why centralisation of services and large corporations gobbling up smaller companies and becoming behemoth services is so dangerous.
I am born too late to understand what Y2K problem was, this (the result) might be what people thought could happen.
Kinda I guess. It was about clocks rolling over from 1999 to 2000 and causing a buffer overflow that would supposedly crash all systems everywhere causing the country to come to a hault.
And it was okay because a lot of people worked really really hard to make it be okay.
Most old systems used two digits for years. The year would go from 99 to 0. Any software doing a date comparison will get a garbage result. If a task needs to be run every 5 minutes, what will the software do if that task was last run 99 years from now? It will not work properly.
Governments and businesses spent lots of money and time patching critical systems to handle the date change. The media made a circus out of it, but when the year rolled over, everything was fine.
Also a lot of people were “on call” to handle any problems when the year changed, so the few problem that had passed unnoticed when doing the fixed and did pop up when the year changed, got solved a lot faster than they normally would.
We also got the worst version of Windows ever, ME. Tho maybe with all the BS they’ve done with 11 that might change.
I’m not sure I’d stick to calling it the worst version “ever” since MS is trying really hard to out do themselves.
I’d use ME before the adware that is the current version. It wasn’t that bad, it was just Win98 with some visual slop on top that crashed slightly more often.
Millennium Editions ruin everything!! 🤬
Y2K was going to be the end of civilisation. This was basically done by the time I woke up today.
