> Curiously enough, to this day experts disagree over why nothing happened: did the world’s IT professionals unite to successfully avert an impending disaster? Or was it all a pointless panic and a colossal waste of money?<p>I don’t think there’s a real disagreement here. A lot of IT workers did a lot of overtime, and also the truly apocalyptic predictions were ridiculous and never going to happen. People worked really hard to make sure manufacturing plants and payroll systems would keep chugging along, not to prevent the end of society, which was never really in play.
Mostly a lot of work got things fixed. But also, around 2000 society wasn't nearly as automated as it is now. I'm sure it would have caused major outages if nothing had been done but whole continents wouldn't have starved :)<p>If the same thing were to happen tomorrow then yes, shit would really hit the fan.<p>Luckily IT is no longer the cowboy landscape it used to be. Sure there's still a lot of messing around but it's not like in the late 90s. I worked for a major company that had every laptop's administrator password set to <simple word>123 . That sort of stuff. I'm kinda surprised that didn't lead to really major hacks.
There were real bugs and there was a real possibility of major disruption. We were spared because of mobilization of resources and the dedication of the programmers involved.