Y2K Cascade

This timeline explores the world after a large accidental nuclear bombing run of the entire earth occurs due to a massive computer malfunction. It was caused by Y2K.

The Point of Divergence of the Y2K Cascade timeline is 12:00:01 AM, January 1, 2000, on which, a global computer malfunction already predicted becomes even more serious than ever imagined.

This computer bug leads to a different outcome of a fairly insignificant, at least nowadays, event that took place.

In the OTL, Y2K was just another scare about how the world would've ended if our computers stopped working. After January 1, 2000, came to pass, with no huge shutdowns or massive undersea earthquakes, Y2K slipped from the minds of many.

This timeline predicts the results after Y2K did happen. When the clocks struct 12:00:01 AM, computers start malfunctioning all around the globe. Mobile phone lines stop working, computer networks cease to connect, and control of remote-controlled items are lost. During this time, the nuclear arsenals of the world are launched. Countries with small, controlled, arsenals suspect the malfunctions and loss of contact to be the responsibility of other countries. Larger arsenal-holding countries watch helplessly as their own nuclear missiles rain down on other countries as well as their own.

With the world savagely burned and destroyed in every corner, it is suspected only five hundred million people were alive in the world after the bomb dropping ended, and only two hundred and thirty million once the fallout cleared and the crops started growing back.

After agonizing events that are still in their after-effects in some parts of the world, regions, territories, and countries stabilize. Over the years, new states erupt from the barren wasteland, and other states join more powerful ones. The world, more or less, is equivalent in technological terms as of 2012 ATL, to the 1930's.

Now, twelve years after that fateful day, prosperity is finally being achieved in the most developed parts of the globe. The United Nations has been reformed, The European Union is rebuilding itself, The African Union however, decides not to revitalize itself.