We were warned that our embrace of computer technology would lead to disaster.
By incorporating computers into ever more areas of our lives, we were told, we had created a scenario in which a mundane glitch could bring everything crashing down. Air travel would be snarled, bank accounts would become inaccessible, essential services would be seriously disrupted, and people would stare in horror as the computers they relied on for so much simply stopped working.
These warnings applied not to last week’s CrowdStrike IT outages, but to the year 2000 computer problem (Y2K), when experts warned that a disaster would unfold when 1999 became 2000 unless precautions were taken.