What's more, the timing has made it necessary to prepare contingency plans for a winter storm or a global computer meltdown.

The graphic did not in the end, it seems, represent some kind of computer meltdown.

"It was computer meltdown," he said.

The problems weren't unforeseeable: neither the computer meltdowns nor the manpower shortage.

"This isn't like the Y-2K crisis where everyone was afraid of a computer meltdown that never happened," Mr. Johnson added.

Indeed, as the new millennium approached, there were fears that a large-scale computer meltdown would paralyze hospitals, police and other basic services.

Weddings, funerals, long-distance commercials, computer meltdowns, fuggedaboudit!

By the late 1990's, orders poured in from the East Coast and elsewhere from people worried by doomsday talk about a turn-of-the-millennium computer meltdown.

This was however cut short after a multiple computer meltdown in 2008 left Burst with no equipment or software.

The Internet has become a vital part of commerce and culture, but it is still a free-for-all when it comes to facing computer meltdowns.