I think the false missile alert message in Hawaii in 2018 would qualify. There were some amounts of fear and confusion, although it seems to have been cleared up relatively quickly.
There was also a similar false alert of a major earthquake in Tokyo in 2016.
This might count as an attempt to avoid a panic rather than the results of one, but a near-panic situation brought down the Berlin Wall.
From Cracked.com:
Yeah, I think the false missile alerts and the Battle of LA would qualify. It amazes me how fast the rumour and misinformation flows. Ohh Good one, Ethilrist!
Amen. Some of my seniors and peers at work keep bringing this up every time I try to argue that preparation and planning is required for some future event (most recently, the risk of a no-deal brexit).
We avoided a Y2K crisis not because it was imaginary, but because we worked to fix the problems.
Examples of human panic though, probably include things like bank runs and panic buying - admittedly, these are not on the global catastrophe scale that the OP is perhaps looking for, but they are indicators of how people may behave in the face of a perceived crisis.
In 1973, Johnny Carson caused a run on toilet paper by joking about a report he had read which indicated there might be a shortage some time in the future. His joke was seen by many more people than the report was, so the next day everybody went out to buy toilet paper, which used up all the paper in the stores, so people were looking at empty shelves, so… panic. He had to issue a retraction.
We can also include market panics. Even if we allow that some of them involved computer program trading that didn’t know when to stop, there were no computers in October 1929.
I am curious though. If nothing was fixed, was the Y2K crisis really serious enough that people would have to hoard a year supply of food and thousands of round of ammo? Because some people were doing that. How serious a problem was it actually? It could still warrant a panic if they were was overreacting to a real problem.
I’ve heard the original broadcast several times; a college station in my town broadcasts it every Halloween. Among other things, it was not in “real time” so unless someone got in on it somewhere in the middle and didn’t tune into other stations, I couldn’t imagine panic, mass or otherwise.
There was a lot of panic in the fall of 2014 as an offshoot of the African Ebola outbreak. Remember some of that? One of the people who became fearful was my friend’s then-15-year-old daughter, who came to her in tears, afraid that we were all going to die from Ebola. My friend flipped open her laptop and explained why we didn’t have to worry about that here in the Midwest, and that mutated into a long conversation about AIDS, something people really DID fear in the early 1980s, and some of that fear was not unjustified, because at first, we had no clue what caused it, how it was spread, who was REALLY at risk, how to treat it, etc.
Some people STILL do that. The Mormons do believe in food storage, although they rotate it if they’re doing it properly.
No.
Does that EVER happen? Hollywood would seem to imply that as soon as the EAS buzzersounds people run out into the street to flip over cars and set them on fire.
Considering how bad humans tend to be at spending money in an appropriate timeframe to avert disaster even when they’ve been well-warned of it, I always found it surprising that the Y2K stuff was actually dealt with in a reasonable and timely manner.
Of course, that does lead to the irony of people acting like this was wasted time and effort, because nothing happened. :rolleyes:
That’s what I came here to post.
Unlike most of the examples here, there was really nothing. And people’s lives were ruined, because of some crazy stories, absurd beliefs, an overzealous, publicity-conscious court and law enforcement system, and people who refused to admit they were wrong.
Joseph McCarthy was an asshole, but at least there actually *was *a communist conspiracy in the U.S.
How about the Bowling Green Massacre?
I also remember the swine flu scare in the fall of 1976, although even then, as an adolescent, I understood it somewhat because it came on the heels of the identification of Legionnaire’s disease, which is terrifying but we know now that it is not transmissible person-to-person.
So, every consequential disaster of the Y2K bug, globally was diverted? Every single program in the world that could have had catastrophic consequences was fixed before midnight 12/31/99? Not buying it. If the problem was as bad as it was purported there should have been one single town or municipality in the world whose power infrastructure failed and stayed down for months. There was not. The magnitude of the potential problems were exaggerated. Were there issues? Yes. Did developers fix a lot of annoying issues that would have happened? Yes. Was the world in danger? No way.
i heard there were some problems in parts of asia and africa where they were still using apple 2/e or win 3.0 486’s type of stuff but nothing horrible that wasnt solved ina few weeks
Lots of things were fixed. My ex-wife was a mainframe programmer at the time, and she said that people had been changing their coding habits for years. There were still a ton of computers out there that weren’t compliant; I remember reading of one state that was told it had to swap out all its mainframes or the payroll system would choke. They did the swap, and left four of them up and running just to see what would happen. They died.
Thats a maybe. Experts have said it was overblown, but that it could have been bad, just not world ending bad.
Except that altho it was horrible, it was quite small scale. I mean, I dont know anyone who was affected by it. The articles i read were pretty small numbers, maybe like what 100 victims?
Yeah, and a surprisingly large number. Altho it seems like he had no real idea, it was the old Blind Squirrel.