If unchecked by law, regulation or reason, legal costs will greatly exceed those of remediation. Another potential problem is that a fix is not always a fix. Preparing hubs and terminals for the millennium transition is an essential, but far from adequate, step. Even if most information systems are modified and then faithfully tested, they still could fail because of interconnection with systems that have not been fixed. This creates the potential for a rolling wave of multiple, parallel failures.
Embedded systems are the most critical.
No one knows for what purposes or where these billions of chips have been implanted. There is no audit trail. Another problem is that repairs induce errors. While experts may differ over the number of Y2K problems that will not be corrected in time, as well as the severity of resultant damage, all acknowledge that remedial actions will be less than 100 percent effective-in some instances, less than 85 percent. One expert predicts that as many as 10 percent of repairs will create new defects, and the issue of bad fixes is not widely discussed in the year 2000 literature.