
Ask HN: Did anything actually happen due to Y2K? - tombert
While it&#x27;s obvious that the Y2K bug didn&#x27;t have the apocalyptic impact that people were freaking out about, I was curious if anything major broke&#x2F;malfunctioned&#x2F;did-something-unexpected because of it.
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sheraz
I'm currently consulting on a workforce management SaaS. (Think of workforce
management as a time clock where people can punch in and out).

It was interesting to learn that starting in 2015 some customers were having
trouble generating payroll for their youngest employees (aged 16 years) at the
time. In debugging the issue it was concluded that Y2k was the issue (sort
of).

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boznz
Lots of consultants made a fuck tonne of money

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ed_db
Yes, this is the worst one that I've heard of:
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1541557.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1541557.stm)

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flukus
Sounds like a procedural error too, giving patients a probability, not a test
result.

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spcelzrd
I was a contractor at a Fortune 500 company in 1999. We had a six month code
freeze. We couldn't even make changes to development. So I was very bored.
Taught myself PalmOS development while I waited.

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LarryMade2
Yeah: Tech Support

Peachtree changed their tune early on from "Yes it will work past 2000" to "We
only support versions beyond version Y for the Y2k changeover" (no direct
mention that the older versions will work)

Many publishers' tech support got ran over by marketing to con people to buy
new software/hardware based on various real and imagined FUD. Y2K was a big
inspiration.

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daodedickinson
I remember that New Mexico's driver's license system went down.

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amorphid
I remember hearing of isolated incidents, but nothing major happened that I'm
aware of. I guess the biggest thing to happen was a lot of COBOL programmers
made pretty good coin leading up to January 1, 2000.

