I apologize for publishing yet another y2k disaster senario. But the following one has a fresh approach in that it focusses on computerization in banks, electricity, and food supply. It shows what could happen if there are interruptions in systems that work only if they NEVER STOP, and that funtion without any meaningful manual or paper backups.
Feature
by Colin McGhee
What is Meltdown?
Millennium Meltdown is the scenario we face if the race against time to defuse the Millennium Bomb is lost. The date 'bug' must be got out of all significant software used on the computers which run the enterprises which together interact to form society. Billions of lines of new software code has to be written, tested and installed before 31 December 1999 otherwise the computers will fail.
Meltdown! The phrase came into common usage though the movie The China Syndrome, and refers to a nuclear power plant disaster where the enriched uranium rods go out of control and melt their way through the containment vessel. 'Millennium Meltdown' refers to a vision of what would happen to a society which has become absolutely dependent upon computers when sufficiently large numbers of those computers stop working at the same time.
If the Millennium Bug can bring the global economy shuddering to a sudden halt it is through the computerised communications controlling the vulnerable money markets and stock exchanges. The famous 'Crash of '87' demonstrated that the trading bubble in American, European and Asian markets can be burst in minutes by runaway computerized trading. The Millennium Bug could stop trading altogether. The world's capital system is reliant to an extraordinary degree on computer and communications systems which are one hundred per cent software dependent. The US Congress and the UK House of Parliament have already been warned of the dangers.
The world's economy is presently based upon a concept of continuous expansion. The controlling developed countries are at the helm, and their activity is driven by the profit motive and realised through the mechanisms of their global network of stock and money markets. Those markets are now all linked by computer.
These operations represent the command and control centres of the world economies today and are entirely dependent on communications and computers. The computers sit in the offices of stock brokers, the floors of futures markets and stock exchanges, finance and investment houses, economic consultants, banks and financial journalists. They are connected in an enormous worldwide network and an information infrastructure which links together both the mass media and the financial decision makers. The media provides a feed-back loop to the markets, influencing perceptions of the potential for profit or loss. Hair trigger reactions result in decisions to buy or sell stock.
If the computers do not work the whole money market process, and all others dependent upon it, stop. The problem with the trading machine is that it does not have the ability to stop in place. In fact it only has an existence by virtue of a sort of perpetual motion. At the end of the day, as each market closes, all current holdings have a published value which forms the basis for credit and debit trading.
Without computers there can be no such market valuations, and no method of exchanging stocks and shares, foreign currency, domestic cash, government bonds and a thousand other instruments by which wealth is calculated. Ledgers have almost entirely disappeared - only computers now hold the records. Assets held as banks, which form the basis of credit and trading, become intangible if their value cannot be found on the computer screen. Neither corporations nor individuals can spend their money if the banks cannot present or value it. Worse, they may not even be able to provide access to it. The banks have made their everyday retail operations entirely computer dependent and they are very intricately connected with computerised retailing through electronic point of sale.
The large supermarket chains provide most of the food supply in the cities. It is the most basic sale necessary and we take it entirely for granted. But the form of food distribution which we have opted for in our cities makes society entirely vulnerable to the Millennium Bug. Computerization of the food supply is now a fact as the majority of households in our cities buy their food from supermarket shelves.
The last decade has seen food supermarket retail operations dominated by electronic funds transfer at point of sale (EFTPOS). Food stores are critically dependent upon computers for records of purchase and re-stocking, ordering, supply and delivery, and all forms of payment processing between themselves, their suppliers and their banks.
The store relies upon computers to know how much has been sold of each item, what to order from suppliers and central depots to replenish the shelves, how to load its fleets of trucks and to route them to their destinations. It relies upon computers to price every item on its shelves and to read the codes on those items and calculate the till receipt.
Think about what happens if the computers go down. Without functioning computers the store cannot operate. It does not know what bar code price to put on items it will display for sale, it cannot recognise the prices of any item it is selling, it cannot add up the items in the grocery basket, and it cannot present a bill for payment.
The moment the plastic card - be it bank debit card or store loyalty card is presented to the grocery check-out computer, a call is made to the store's central computer to check available credit. Unless the store can get an answer from the bank computer, the system cannot sell.
Computer software failure has already resulted in isolated incidents of banks failing to conduct these processes. Barclays Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland are amongst UK banks that have tasted the panic of widespread system failure in recent years. In the case of these recent failures in software, there has been an immediate run on manual tills as customers went for paper money. But the banks were unable even to give up-to-date balances.
If the computers which hold the balance are down, plastic card shopping is out for the count. But there are smaller stores that handle cash without computerization. In the rush for paper money to spend in these stores the supply of notes would rapidly run out, even if bank systems could distribute it.
It is not difficult to envisage a runaway reaction. When all these things happen together, they start to trigger meltdown of the systems that organise food, transport, work, power and people. If food supply is just one of the most critical life supporting operations vulnerable to computer failure, electricity supply is another. Load balancing of supply and phase against demand must be done to avoid unscheduled blackouts, with the concomitant effects for every appliance and machine driven by electricity - like computers.
Food and electricity supply are obviously vital and vulnerable elements in city life, and there are examples of many more component parts of the machine that is today's organised society dependent upon computers. Fuel deliveries of petrol and diesel are heavily dependent upon computerised plastic money for retailing, and the oil companies use computers extensively for scheduling deliveries to the pumps. But consider all such elements, like transport, as just cogs in the machine. They rely upon something else to make them work - without which their function has no meaning
- people.
People are required to travel to work every day, but what would happen in a meltdown situation? With transport in chaos, food hard to get, cash unavailable and gas stations out of fuel or subject to long queues of panic buyers, people will either not get to work at all or get there late. Millions of people failing to reach their work places in the cities will not help a situation just when they are most needed to solve a series of simultaneous crises caused by multiple operations failures. Modern organisations have very little built-in redundancy to save the day. Supply has been organised on the 'just-in-time' principle and staffing organised according to 'just-enough' to get the job done with the minimum of manpower. In a meltdown situation it may be just-too-little.
Hearing that you cannot buy food in the supermarkets or get money from hole-in-the-wall cash machines, and that there are widespread power cuts, might well spur people to take steps to take care of their own domestic crises rather than get in to work. If enough people fail to turn up to work the organisations affected will stop in their tracks. If 'work' is not working there is no means of making the system of labour, payment, supply, credit, shopping, consumption, demand and re-supply work.
This is what is meant by Millennium Meltdown. Society might never be put back together in the same way because this is a machine we have created which has become dependent upon never stopping.
The city system can slow down for a few days around scheduled holidays, but these have been anticipated. What has never been anticipated is an unscheduled massive disruption of multiple systems continuing for a long period.
Comment
If enough computer systems fail to make it into the year 2000, then the complex machine we call society, with its interlinked banking, trading, retailing and organisational systems will fail with a domino effect. In the words of the recent UK government report, we face a catastrophe.
But the fact remains, we are still unsure that the defusing task can be completed. Success in getting the Millennium Bug out of enough major systems to steer the balance of enterprises and government organisations clear of such a catastrophe is not a foregone conclusion. It is the main plan today. But there is no fall-back plan.
Not all companies and governments are even aware of the urgency of the matter and the size and scale of the efforts required to re-program software and re-configure computer systems. Those who are, flag up further hurdles as they get deeper into the task.
For example, development trials of new software, re-configured to be Millennium Bug proof, require separate computer systems on which to run the tests. In the UK, at least one major system house which has traditionally sold time-sharing on its computers is now out of computer capacity. As the demand grows, can the industry meet the hardware as well as the software challenge?
The Millennium Bomb may pose as great a danger to society as war. Yet there is no coherent national or international plan for dealing with it. Unless the bulk of systems work there will not be a critical mass of enterprises available after 31 December 1999 to continue macro economic activity.
We are thus forced to think the unthinkable. We need to consider fallback plans, which concern not just computers but society as a whole.
The minimum requirements in a meltdown scenario could be considered water, food power distribution, and law and order. During the second world war Britain was run by government Ministries which commandeered all production and distribution. Before long the government may be forced to consider a similar fallback situation, unless they are sure that current efforts will succeed. |
