-Caveat Lector-
MILLENNIUM BUG MYSTERY
BY JOHN COLES AND ROGER NUTTALL
DOOM merchants who forecast chaos caused by the Millennium Bug were today
waking up to a £400billion headache.
They had the job of explaining how the world could spend so much money on
what seems to have been one of the biggest non-events.
With barely a glitch in computers throughout the international community,
critics accused governments of a massive and costly over-reaction.
In Britain, ministers poured £430million into combating the
computer-threatening bug. An estimated £10billion was spent by private
industry, including £200million by electricity chiefs and £100million by
British Airways.
Last night a spokeswoman for the Millennium Centre - the Government's
monitoring HQ in the heart of Whitehall - defended the measures. "Years of
work went into ensuring a smooth transition and it seems to have been worth
it," she said. Other experts warned that problems could still occur over the
coming days and even months as workers returned to their offices and
bugrelated problems gradually surfaced. However, by yesterday afternoon the
only notable bug-related incident in Britain to be logged was a minor hiccup
in the tide gauges at Portsmouth harbour.
Computer experts made small fortunes ensuring that systems were "Y2K
compliant", charging tens of thousands of pounds for their services. Yet
critics pointed to the lack of problems in poorer countries - such as Russia
and India - which did not invest heavily in anti-bug programmes.
At the Millennium Centre - where Winston Churchill once plotted Hitler's
downfall - ranks of Whitehall officials and press officers were on standby to
deal with any bug problems as 2000 dawned.
But they had one of the quietest nights of all during the celebrations as the
battery of phones linking them with Government departments remained silent.
The first commercial flight of the new millennium landed safely at Heathrow
from Hong Kong just after 5.30am on New Year's Day. The RAF completed test
flights on its planes yesterday and said all had passed without incident.
Also by yesterday suppliers of many key services - including electricity, gas
and water - announced they had all passed the critical date change without a
hitch.
The London Stock Exchange said its internal checks had been satisfactorily
completed in readiness for trading tomorrow. In addition the Financial
Services Authority said that card payment systems, cash-point machines and
phone and online banks were all operating as normal. Paddy Tipping, minister
with responsibility for combating the bug, said: "We have had a good
millennium, but January 4 could be critical, when businesses go back to work.
"We may see some small businesses who have not prepared lose some
information. I have the suspicion that big companies knew the issues and did
the work." Mr Tipping said the avoidance of any disasters so far proved that
the bug fund was "money well spent".
Taskforce 2000, the independent Millennium Bug watchdog, also warned that the
risk of computer failure was still rife.
Assistant director Rob Wilson predicted there would be "hundreds of thousands
of glitches ranging in severity" over the coming months. Seven commercial
nuclear reactors in the US experienced minor Y2K malfunctions in systems used
for access control and monitoring, but none affected safety systems and were
quickly fixed.
In Japan there were data-monitoring problems at four nuclear power plants
caused by the date change, which were all cleared up without incident.
At Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, delighted US and Russian military
experts successfully worked around the clock in an unprecedented show of
co-operation to prevent missiles from being launched by the computer bug.
America panicked momentarily when it detected the launch of three Russian
scud missiles. They turned out to be aimed at Chechnya and were unrelated to
the bug.
The US, which had been on a virtual war footing for any technological
disasters, was scaling back to normality yesterday.
© Express Newspapers, 1999
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