Since I haven't seen this posted anywhere hopefully it will have
interest to all at SeeSat-L who haven't had access to it..
Statement of Bruce W. McConnell, Director, International Y2K Cooperation
Center
3 January 2000, 11:00 a.m. EST
Washington
As of this morning all is going very well. We continue to have no
reports of serious disruptions
anywhere in the world. We have now received "all green" reports from 135
countries.
On our international conference call this morning with Y2K coordinators
from 10 countries, all
participants reported that they were relaxing their monitoring
operations and going to a more normal
operating schedule.
We are proud of the responsible and measured approach taken by countries
around the world to
address the potentially serious impacts of the Y2K computer problem.
Without this work, serious
disruptions would have occurred. We were ready for that potential.
Unprecedented international
cooperation, a resilient infrastructure, and the dedicated efforts of
millions of Y2K workers have
given us this exciting success. We are grateful for their hard work and
for the good luck that have
made this possible.
We expect localized glitches and hiccups to continue to emerge over the
weeks ahead. However, we
are confident that these will be handled in the course of normal
operations. This is because they will
be localized and will occur sporadically, not simultaneously. Although
they will in some cases
temporarily degrade quality of service, we do not expect them to
proliferate or interact to cause any
serious disruptions.
We have reports of individual failures. These range from the critical to
the trivial. In the former
category, yesterday we alerted our world contacts of a newly discovered
failure in a kidney dialysis
machine manufactured by a Swedish-based company. The automatic
disinfection feature does not
operate properly, risking transmission of infection from one patient to
the next. This failure was
noticed in Scotland on Saturday and the information picked up by our
international health care team
led by Ms. Kate Priestly of the United Kingdom's National Health
Services Estates. The UK
Medical Devices Agency has also posted an alert on this device.
On the trivial side, Namibia reports that their radio station computer
that schedules advertisements
failed to function correctly. Advertisements are being scheduled
manually and being aired as normal.
Support for Y2K work must continue where it has not been completed. This
is particularly true in
nuclear energy plants in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
However, because the systems
involved solely provide management information, the fact that this work
has not yet been completed
does not pose any immediate safety threat whatsoever.
Y2K has taught us much about how the world works. The world is both more
resilient and more
connected than we knew. Working together, nations are capable of
managing a tough global
challenge. The worlds information systems have had a complete work-over,
and they are now
passing the physical. We're in good shape for the new century.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 04 2000 - 17:44:42 PST