Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

The Tech Disaster That Didn’t Happen

The world didn’t end when its GPS system reset. So why were so many people so prepared to believe that it would?

April 9, 2019 at 2:30 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

Still works.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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That’s funny. There were no computer-led disasters this past weekend. Shortly before midnight on Saturday, April 6, the clock that keeps official time for the Global Positioning System ran out of space to count the weeks, and rolled back to Week One. The hazards of this “rollover” were hyped in terms comparing the threat to the equally uneventful Y2K — “There’s a chance your GPS system could go haywire”! — and yet, when I climbed into my car on Sunday morning, the GPS worked just fine.

As Avi Natter of Bloomberg News noted, “The world as we know it didn’t end.” The non-event wouldn’t even be worth mentioning, except to note the one thing that did go haywire: the online rumor mill.