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While the impact of the millennium bug might have been minimal in the first days of 2000, that's because an immense amount of work had gone into fixing it ahead of a known deadline, says François Dupressoir, associate professor in cryptography at the University of Bristol.

Twenty five years ago computer programmers were racing to fix the millennium bug amidst fears that it would cause banking systems to crash and planes to fall out of the sky.

It is often tempting to look upon Vladimir Putin as the millennium bug in a human and deadly form.

To them, as they navigate world-threatening issues such as climate change and the coronavirus, the idea of the millennium bug seems quaint.

On a recent podcast, Ms. Vrana learned about the fear in the late 1990s of a “millennium bug” that could collapse worldwide infrastructure through date formatting errors.