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. ### ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 04 2000 - 17:44:42 PST