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Y2K bug rears its ugly head
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January 12, 1999: 7:47 p.m. ET
Incidents in Singapore, Sweden portend looming global computer problems
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - When the ball came down on 1999, most of us thought we had twelve months of grace before the mother of all computer bugs struck.
We were wrong.
Already, millennial poltergeist have made little incursions around the globe.
In Singapore, computerized taxi meters suddenly went dark on New Year's Day. Hours later, when the New Year arrived in Scandinavia, the taxi bug came with it.
Anders Malmqvist, managing director of Taxi Sweden, said, "We haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet. The pricing went out of proportion - it became extremely cheap to take a taxi ride with Taxi Sweden."
At airports in Stockholm and two other cities in Sweden, harried travelers were turned back when computers refused to issue temporary passports after midnight on Jan. 1.
Some computers calculate the current date by working backwards from the start of the next year, so it was predictable that minor glitches would start showing up as early as New Year's Day.
Prognosticators at the GartnerGroup in Boston project a quarter of all Y2K glitches will happen this year, more than half the problems will occur throughout the year 2000, and about 15 percent of the problems will occur in 2001.
In other words, we're already hitting some minor potholes in what will be an increasingly rocky road to 2000...and beyond.
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GartnerGroup
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