When The Lights Went Out, And The Shooting Started, Y2K Started To Feel All Too Real
The Register, Monday, December 29th, 2025
Welcome to a special festive season edition of On Call, in which we share readers' stories of working on the 31st of December 1999 - the moment the tech world held its breath and hoped years of Year 2000 bug remediation efforts would work.
Let's start with a reader we'll Regomize as "Graham" who at the time worked at a cable television network operated by a giant US telco.
Midnight passed without incident for Graham, but at 0010 an actual manifestation of the Y2K bug appeared.
"There was a problem with an old character generator that used an 80286 processor," Graham wrote. "The clock had stopped at midnight and the machine just froze."
Graham and his team spent months preparing for Y2K and sprang into action, then relaxed again when the borked box resumed operations after a simple reboot.
But then came a truly odd incident.