It's been driven by economics, by specialization, by efficient ocean-going transports and air deliveries. International banks allow the moving of funds from buyer to seller, through trusted international clearinghouse networks. That's the debate, that's the big question. Yes, power plants fail on a daily basis. Phone lines go down somewhere on the planet on a daily basis.
Banks mess up transactions with frightening regularity.
But that's not the right question. Y2K isn't a local hurricane. It isn't a local power outage or a local bank error. It's a simultaneous, global slam-dunk event. When a power plant fails, all the power experts get called on the phone lines, and they rush to the scene to fix this lone failing power plant.