Some early damage was felt Thursday in Nigeria, where the state-run telephone company disconnected private carriers who it claimed had failed to prove themselves compliant and thus threatened the entire national network. A few thousand phone users lost service in Nigeria, a country widely assessed as poorly prepared. A minor crisis compared to the income lost by an estimated 1,800 to 3,500 seasonal hotel workers laid off in Jamaica because of a dropoff in holiday tourists blamed on Y2K worries. Holiday hotel bookings on the tropical island, normally at 90 percent this time of year, dropped to 60 percent, the industry said. Ditto to the south on Aruba.
Precaution is the watchword worldwide.
Airlines have canceled hundreds of flights, citing low demand and also out of concern that air traffic control systems in regions such as the Asian subcontinent and Latin America may not be ready. Many airports, from Denmark to Bolivia, will also be closed for the rollover to the new millennium. So will everything from Korean and Polish steel mills, Israel's nuclear power plant, ports from Australia to Holland and Turkey barred big ships from its narrow Bosporus strait. In much of the developing world, where Y2K work began late and money was short, many of the fixes were makeshift. Colombia's air traffic radars, for example, were forwarded to the year 2028, which is identical to 2000 in having 366 days and in their distribution.