Y2K WAS THE FIRST WARNING, CLOUDFLARE WAS THE SECOND WARNING

VANITY | November 21, 2025 | CIB-173RDABN

[CIB-173RDABN]

The recent Cloudflare outage ought to make us stop and think. One small update — a config file that grew bigger than expected — and suddenly a big chunk of the internet stumbled.

Not because of a hacker, not because of a storm, just because of a routine piece of code that didn’t behave the way someone expected.

And it reminded me of something from years ago: Y2K.

Back in 1999 people were predicting everything from power failures to bank shutdowns. What actually happened? Not much. And because of that, a lot of people convinced themselves Y2K was “nothing.”

But the truth is, the reason nothing happened is because programmers spent years fixing it before the clock ever rolled over. It was one of the rare moments where the world fixed the problem *before* it became a disaster.

Unfortunately, people walked away with the wrong lesson. They thought: “See? The experts overreacted.”
Instead of learning: “When we put in the work, we can prevent catastrophe.”

And that’s the problem today. Our systems are far more complicated now than they were in 1999. Back then the internet was still young. Software was smaller. Fewer things depended on each other.

Today everything is connected to everything else. One service depends on another, depends on another, and so on. That Cloudflare glitch was basically a warning shot: a reminder that a tiny mistake can ripple across the entire system instantly.

The fears people had about Y2K weren’t “wrong.” They were just early. We built a world where a single bad update really *can* cause banking problems, transportation failures, supply chain issues — all the things people worried about 25 years ago.

The difference is, back then we fixed it. Today we assume it will fix itself.

Cloudflare’s failure wasn’t the disaster. It was the reminder.

Y2K didn’t teach us that nothing bad will ever happen. It taught us that everything will go wrong eventually if we stop paying attention.

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet
KEYWORDS: anotherstupidvanity; cloudflare; getajob; nobodyaskedyou; pleasestop; toomanyvanities; y2k

[Aevery_Freeman]

One of the most valuable functions of AI could be scouring code for potential failure points.

We (programmers) should have done our best to bullet proof our code but stopping when we met basic functionality was more profitable - especially for contract workers.

I was never impressed by H1-B coders as they were just in it for quick cash.

[greenbrier]

This!

[Celerity]

“When we put in the work, we can prevent catastrophe.”

“I asked an AI program to dig into how connected everything really is. Turns out we rely on computers, the internet, and AI for more parts of everyday life than I realized.”

Am I the only one seeing the folly in this? Hi. I’m also career I.T., systems analyst. The cause of these issues is pretty simple.. vibe coding and it’s precursors.

I’ve worked with many devs, and today’s dev is merely a flawed algorithm with an unhealthy taste for biryani. They don’t care about the output. They don’t know the first thing of what they are doing. They only memorized a few strings and “fake it till they make it”.

India is a problem. China is a problem. Indonesia is a problem. Vietnam is a problem. Thailand is a problem. Put them all together and you have about 99% of modern code. Or more.

[Lockbox]

This is why I fight digital ID, digital money, digital whatever.

Guess in the future I will start using pronouns just to mess with the system, no one can question my pronoun…… 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Disambiguator]

Do you ever show them the portal to another dimension known as a command prompt window?

[dynachrome]

Eggs. One basket. Problem.

[toddmoore]

I was an employee in a fortune 500 pharma company working in a building dedicated for development of a particular high priority new drug candidate. I never understood the details, but witnessed firsthand a Y2K issue at the turn of the year 1999 when a key computer associated with the building HVAC looked ahead one year, didn’t see what it expected, and shut down something that somehow caused an actual electrical fire in the main power for the building HVAC. All work in that building was shut down for weeks until replacement units were procured, installed, and tested, etc. Needless to say, 1999 was the year I became a prepper!

[FreedomPoster]

Dang!

That’s really screwed up right there. Lots had to go wrong that shouldn’t have, for that to happen.

[Dartoid]

Are you seriously asking that?

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

After Cloudflare went down, I asked an AI program to dig into how connected everything really is.

To lazy to do actual research?

[CIB-173RDABN]

Why AI Could Be Crucial to Managing the Year 2038 Risk

Short version: the Year 2038 problem is known, but the hard part is finding every occurrence. Legacy code, embedded devices, and undocumented dependencies make exhaustive human inspection impractical. AI can scan, identify, and even patch issues at scale — but it also becomes another dependence that must be managed.

1. Why humans alone can’t fix this reliably

• Codebases are enormous (millions of lines) and layered with third-party libraries.
• Many systems are embedded devices or legacy firmware that lack documentation.
• Developers don’t always know where time-handling logic lives — it may be hidden inside libraries or middleware.
• Therefore: the problem is known, but its locations are unknown. Humans alone can’t find and patch everything in time.

2. What AI can do that humans practically cannot

• Pattern search at scale: identify 32-bit time usage, unsafe time-handling idioms, and risky library calls across many languages, minified code, and firmware.
• Auto-generate patches: suggest or create 64-bit-safe conversions, rewrite time logic, and produce test scaffolding to validate fixes.
• Runtime anomaly detection: monitor systems for time-related anomalies (negative timestamps, ordering errors, time jumps) and trigger mitigations in real time.

3. The big insight

AI might be the single tool capable of preventing a global cascade from unknown, scattered software faults: it can search deeper and respond faster than human teams. In that sense, AI could be the difference between a localized outage and a broad systemic disruption.

Important caveat: using AI to fix and monitor systems is not foolproof. It introduces new risks and must be deployed carefully.

4. New vulnerabilities AI introduces

• AI can miss edge cases or introduce incorrect fixes if not correctly validated.
• AI itself runs on cloud infrastructure — if that infrastructure is affected, the AI cannot help.
• Automated fixes might produce unforeseen interactions across dependent systems.
• Overreliance on AI can create a false sense of security and reduce human oversight.

5. Bottom line

The Year 2038 risk neatly illustrates our larger pattern: technology amplifies capability and fragility. AI offers a realistic, high-leverage way to reduce the fragility by locating and remediating hidden faults — but it must be treated as both a tool and a system that itself needs redundancy, testing, and governance.

6. Suggested next steps (if you want to act on this)

• Prioritize scanned inventories of devices and software stacks for 32-bit time usage.
• Use AI-assisted code search to identify likely hotspots (embedded firmware, legacy libraries, third-party components).
• Require human review for any automated patch and simulate changes in isolated test environments.
• Build runtime monitors that detect time anomalies and fail-safe to conservative behavior rather than catastrophic defaults.
• Plan redundancy: make sure AI tools have fallbacks and offline/manual recovery procedures.

This is the answer I got when I asked ChatGPT about it.

[CIB-173RDABN]

To lazy to do actual research?
—
Yes, I am.

[ShadowAce]

Does no one else see the irony/hypocrisy of using AI to come up with a fix for computer issues?

• AI is part of the system(s) we're tyring to fix
• AI has already been proven to not be reliable
• AI is usually trained/programmed by people with priorities not related to reality

I'm sure there are other objections to it, but the sheer willingness to blindly accept whatever it spits out is mindboggling to me--especially on this forum.

[The Louiswu]

[discostu]

Cloudflare was more like 116th warning. We’ve centralized a bunch of stuff on the internet, thus breaking the model it was built on. And everybody knows what the problem is, the internet now has a couple dozen single points of failure. So when something like Cloudflare or Google Analytics or AWS go down a good chunk of the internet goes with it. And they know how to solve the problem too, do their own work and stop relying on these 3rd parties. But they’re not going to because that would be expensive and honestly they wouldn’t do it as well as the 3rd parties (specialization can be good). So we just cruise along on this with half the internet going down periodically.

[Theophilus]

I wouldn’t say the Internet is “fragile”. It was designed as DARPANET to survive nuclear war. It might be the least “fragile” man made system on the planet. Having said that, it can still be vulnerable. It’s nodes are certainly vulnerable.

[dayglored]

> This has been making the rounds and belongs on the thread.

Yep! That's great. Love the angry bird!

[dayglored]

> Is COBOL still alive anywhere?

You're kidding, right? COBOL is alive EVERYWHERE.

COBOL is still in extremely wide and critical usage today, particularly within large enterprises, financial institutions, and government agencies. It powers the "backbone" systems for much of the world's commerce and infrastructure.

There are estimated to be between 200 billion and 800 billion lines of COBOL code in active production systems worldwide. That's "billion" with a 'B'.

COBOL systems are responsible for handling an estimated 70% of all global business transactions. This includes roughly 95% of all ATM swipes and a majority of in-person credit card processing.

So, yeah.

[Telepathic Intruder]

You got champagne!!?? No fair! Oh well I got my bonus so I can’t complain.

[ChinaGotTheGoodsOnClinton]

I don’t think you have to go back to Y2K.

What about AWS and Azure, just a few weeks ago?