Most of the companies I was familiar with then did not have enough time or resources to check for and resolve every problem, and these problems were very real. At some companies the engineers were given autonomy, authority, and effectively unlimited budget to do literally whatever was required to mitigate any publicly visible failures that occurred. We had a lot of backup plans to keep operations running, sometimes literally paper and pencil, when the inevitable failures occurred. A lot of companies were furiously faking it and throwing people at the problem.

I directly witnessed a few near catastrophic failures due to Y2K at different companies, literally company killers. We kept everything (barely) running long enough to shore up and address the failures without anyone noticing, partly because we had prepared to operate in the face of those failures since we knew there was no way to fix them beforehand. It was a tremendous decentralized propaganda coup. No one wanted to be the company that failed as a result, the potential liability alone was massive.

The idea that what was averted was minor is a pretty naive take. I was genuinely surprised that we actually managed to hold some of the disasters together long enough — out of sight and out of mind — to fix them without anyone noticing critical systems were offline for months. IT was a bit more glitchy, slow, and unavailable back then, so the excuses were more plausible.

> Some bad things happened but not on a catastrophic level that warranted the level of investment that was put into Y2K projects.

Possibly the catastrophic things were prioritized and fixed?

Do you have any data at all to support your claim?