Y2K WAS THE FIRST WARNING, CLOUDFLARE WAS THE SECOND WARNING

VANITY | November 21, 2025 | CIB-173RDABN

[Wuli]

Too many eggs in one basket, in any industry, or any group of enterprises is always a major crisis waiting to happen. The 2008 financial crisis was not caused by just some bad policies and practices, but by “group think” on those things - too little independent thinking by too many major players. Often being independent helps prevent the error of thinking there is comfort and security just by agreeing to act like everyone else. That comfort can be short lived when everyone fails for the same reasons.

The efficiency of computerized information management should have by now made it economically feasible for hundreds if not thousands of separate independent companies doing for their clients what Cloudfare does.

The first to join the Cloludfare exodus should be a few hundred major companies who all agree they will not put all their data or security or communications in the same basket as each other; that they will all work and invest in better information security by hugely diversifying where the data and information is kept and or handled. Dispersal not concentration should be an altogether better security.

[gitmo]

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.

I was one of those programmers. We worked hard prepping for Y2K.

[TBP]

BTTT

[oldtech]

I have to say as a computer user only that I am not understanding of much of this. Is there a way that this info can be put into language the average dummy could understand?

[dayglored]

> The first to join the Cloludfare exodus should be a few hundred major companies who all agree they will not put all their data or security or communications in the same basket as each other; that they will all work and invest in better information security by hugely diversifying where the data and information is kept and or handled. Dispersal not concentration should be an altogether better security.

While I agree in general about diversity vs. concentration, one must also recognize that the cost of diversifying is that you now have a broader and inconsistent (heterogenous) attack surface. Each service provider has their own way of doing things, and they all, by definition, have vulnerabilities that can be exploited -- most of them different on each service.

So while dispersal can provide robustness against downtime due to deploying a bad config or other internal error, you must increase your security awareness to take multiple service providers into account. It's dismaying how lax many of them are about things like patching known vulns.

[dayglored]

> I have to say as a computer user only that I am not understanding of much of this. Is there a way that this info can be put into language the average dummy could understand?

Yes, I could give you an "Executive Summary", but you'd miss the important implications.

Here's an analogy. Every internal combustion car engine has a "timing belt".

What is the timing belt for?

Executive Summary: It keeps all the various moving parts synchronized. It is extremely important that it is properly installed, properly tensioned, and most of all that it never break.

But what does that mean, practically speaking?

Among other things, if it's not properly installed and tensioned, the car won't start and run. And if it breaks while the car is running, the crankshaft and valves will get out of synch and the engine will turn into a pile of broken pieces in a matter of seconds.

What this thread is discussing (e.g. DNS) are the parts of the internet, just like the crankshaft and valves are parts of a car engine. If they get messed up, it breaks the internet. Unfortunately, the technical aspects of the internet are not easily reduced to non-technical, non-jargon versions, and there are a ton of such aspects.

So unfortunately, the answer is a qualified.... "not really".

Does that help at all?

[gitmo]

Most computer systems in the 20th century used 6 digit dates: YYMMDD. So when we were going to go from 991231 (Dec 31, 1999) to 000101 (Jan 1, 2000) the systems would think it was almost a hundred years before the last transaction.

Things that were supposed to happen that 1st day of the 21st century would now be processed as though they wouldn’t happen for another 100 years.

We had to change all date formats in all our databases and code to YYYYMMDD format. That was a lot of code changes, a lot of data transformations, and an amazing amount of testing and retesting.

Many systems were just going to crash.

It took many months of intense work to prepare and we were all at our stations as the new year rolled in to fix disasters as they popped up.

[If You Want It Fixed - Fix It]

Y2K was a panic attack like every 2nd coming of Christ.

Like climate change, global cooling, maga, the insurrection, .......

[dagunk]

Hey - Don’t forget CrowdStrike last year. That was entertaining.

Y2K? eh, nothing....

Had a system with an operating system so old it kept on counting hours/minutes/seconds after midnight. Ended up with 2400 and 2600 hours a few times when we operated past midnight. No way to fix, had to shut down and reboot. We just kept on going.

[rarestia]

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

"Oh! Is this Linux?"