The world didn’t end: GPS devices save the date, fend off Y2K hysteria

It was the Y2K bug’s little brother, with about the same impact: the world as we know it didn’t end.

Thanks to a quirk in how Global Positioning Systems keep track of time, some devices were due to have their calendars reset at 7:59 p.m. EDT on Saturday. The change echoed the mostly overhyped hysteria about global computer systems that gripped the world when the calendar was about to tick over from 1999 to 2000. Societal collapse was again avoided.

The glitch was only expected to affect older GPS systems or ones that hadn’t been updated. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did signal it wasn’t expecting wide-scale disruptions, but it still warned that utilities, financial systems, airlines and telecommunication systems could be affected by the problem.