at the end 1999, my employer hosted what I guess was half NYE Party and half Incident Response. We were optimistic that we wouldn't have issues but figured it'd

at the end 1999, my employer hosted what I guess was half NYE Party and half Incident Response. We were optimistic that we wouldn't have issues but figured it'd be wise to have a sufficient crew of designated drivers, so to speak. Our monitoring system included a mercator projection on some big screens, with colored that showed where our gear was and whose color indicated whether it was down, being hammered, etc. We had no equipment in UTC+14, so there was an hour of waiting between that zone reaching y2k and when we'd maybe see some action. The control room was mobbed since we also had some televisions running cable news there and everyone wanted to see it. Despite the anxiety, the gear was looking fine everywhere, until about 5 minutes before midnight in UTC+13, when our locations in New Zealand started to turn red. A hush fell over the room as the operators attempted to open connections to those boxes. The connection attempts appeared to hang, and the party got somber. But after the eternity of a few seconds, we were in. The machines were alive but being hammered; the alerts just indicated the excessive traffic caused by mass numbers of users refreshing NZ based websites as the date change approached, to see whether they'd fallen off the net or not. Breathing resumed. After 15 minutes or so had passed, the traffic fell off, and by the time y2k reached us in UTC+5 we'd been in full festive mode for hours. I still can't look at New Zealand on a map without seeing it covered in angry red circles, though.