Can you help me with a Y2K-related failures list?

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In a meeting earlier today with leaders from my church and children's school, one of the leaders requested "proof" of Y2K failures. Since this is a religious leader, my response was that a drop of rain didn't have to fall on Noah's head for him to start building the ark. (ouch). Tactless, I know, but I did get my point across.

Anyway, the meeting was successful in that most of them finally get it, and are now talking about specific preparations for both the school and the church community. In an effort to help the leaders that now get it with the remaining DWGIs, I am putting together a list of Y2K-related failures that have already happened. I figure it can't hurt.

The only such list that I know of is the "Y2K occurrences" section on the Cassandra Project site, which was updated last December. But that is only a start. Are there other lists, or something else perhaps that would be useful along the lines of documented failures that I can use in addition? It would really be appreciated.

p.s. I haven't been on the forum for more than a few minutes the last couple days, and expect this to continue for a while yet. If you have a question for me or want to talk about something, just post it to this thread - it will probably be the only one I have time to read and respond to. Thanks, Rob

-- Rob Michaels (sonofdust@net.com), January 27, 1999

Answers

yes, there are lots of lists out there. check thru the posts on this forum, especially throughout january. there have been threads about the '99 problem manifesting itself in january, also some threads about the Jo Anne Effect which occurs when trying to do forecasting, mostly an accounting problem. i personally know of plenty of these kinds of problems among the people and businesses i know, both large and small businesses.

-- jocelyne slough (jonslough@tln.net), January 27, 1999.

de Jager's site has a list. I haven't looked at it.

-- Puddintame (dit@dot.com), January 27, 1999.

yes, there are lots of lists out there. check thru the posts on this forum, especially throughout january. there have been threads about the '99 problem manifesting itself in january, also some threads about the Jo Anne Effect which occurs when trying to do forecasting, mostly an accounting problem. i personally know of plenty of these kinds of problems among the people and businesses i know, both large and small businesses. the Jo Anne Effect will manifest at different times for companies, depending on when they do their forecasting and when their fiscal year ends. some businesses i know had a problem on jan 4, the first business day, others had it later on because they were closed several days due to the big blizzard. one large company had a massive problem on jan 15 when they went to do their forecasts into next year, and they didn't even know WHAT the problem was, until yesterday jan 26, which is when they asked my husband about it.

-- jocelyne slough (jonslough@tln.net), January 27, 1999.

Here's another site......http://info.cv.nrao.edu/y2k/sighting.htm

-- Lisa (logold@kdsi.net), January 27, 1999.

Here are some links:

1999 Reported Problems Report (by Industry Sector)

Year 2000 Bug Bytes

Electric Utilities and Year 2000 - Real Life Y2K in the Industry

The Cassandra Project - Year 2000 Examples

I was skeptical too...

-- Reporter (foo@foo.bar), January 27, 1999.



Here's another site Rob.

Mr. Y2K's Non-Exploitive Year 2000 Site

Check under the topic of "Ringing the Alarm Bells"

-- Other Lisa (LisaWard2@aol.com), January 27, 1999.


Rob,

I posted these examples in another thread- they might be of use to you. They deal only with embedded chips/systems.

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Try the Fortune magazine from April 27 for one look at what Y2K can do to manufacturing:

http://pathfinder.com/fortune/1998/980427/imt.html

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Here's one about how *one*third* of computer-related hospital/health care equipment in South Australia failed due to Y2K (and largely due to embedded chips/systems). The failure rate is not always that high (in fact, that's the highest I've seen, but I doubt it's all due to embeddeds, though obviously, from the equipment described, at least some of it is):

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/state/4227351.htm

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A look at some potential problems for embeddeds in the power grid from EE Times:

http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?EET19981214S0057

-----------------------------

You can also read my interview with Rick Cowles, the top Y2K electricity & power expert, which touches on the embeddeds subject:

http://www.cbn.org/y2k/cowles.htm

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Here's more on problems in the power & health care industries:

http://www.businesstoday.com/techpages/y2kdeep101598.htm

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Still another one on embeddeds & power, from Forbes:

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/98/0921/6206258a.htm

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Two links on how embeddeds can affect drinking water:

http://www.sltrib.com/01181999/utah/75860.htm

http://www.canoe.ca/Year2000Crisis/jan13_warroom.html

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Also, check out this page- from the Institution of Electrical Engineers in the UK:

http://www.iee.org.uk/2000risk/

------------------------------- And don't miss this introduction to embeddeds:

http://www.iinet.net.au/~vector/yr2000em.html

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In addition, somewhere or other I have an article(s) about the threat embeddeds pose to international shipping (on the big tankers), but I can't find it at the moment.

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-- Drew Parkhill/CBN News (y2k@cbn.org), January 27, 1999.


Thanks All. I will be spending a lot of time putting this together as I intend to check out every url and link you have been kind enough to provide. If possible, I will post the end result of what I come up with on this thread so that anyone here can use it for all of the DGIs, FIs and DWGIs that they know.

-- Rob Michaels (sonofdust@net.com), January 27, 1999.

Well, I am about half-way done. All of the information from the url's and links above have been put into one place so that I can now review everything to come up with the final list. This prints out at over 40 pages! It will have to be a lot shorter for anyone to actually read it so I will be going through all of it to select and weed out stuff. Selection criteria will be twofold: It must be a demonstrated actual failure and the reference must contain the source for the information reported. I am still hoping to post the list of failures to this thread when I am done. I miss talking to all of you and reading the posts - hopefully I can wrap this up in the next day or so. Bye for now, Rob.

-- Rob Michaels (sonofdust@net.com), January 28, 1999.

I am done with the list. It started out at about 40 pages of info which I have gone through and distilled into about 7 printed pages - since this is about the most I think people will actually read. Rather than posting it to this thread, later today I will put it on its own new thread called "List of Y2K failures - Here is proof". It will be a very long post, but I hope that this will be out-weighed by its usefulness to us all. See you later - Rob

-- Rob Michaels (sonofdust@net.com), January 29, 1999.


Well, if it's not useful, the paper we print it on can be used for tinder in the fireplace next Jan.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), January 29, 1999.

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