If you're driving down the road, see an overturned cart in your path, and safely avoid it, was the cart a danger to you? Nothing bad happened, so was the cart a hoax? The Y2K problem was, for a number of organizations, precisely such a cart, and it was successfully avoided to the extent nothing seriously bad happened as a result of the bug (really, an engineering trade-off which lived too long in the wild) so we can either count it as a victory of foresight and disaster aversion, or we can say it was all a hoax and there was never anything to it. Guess which conclusion will best let us avoid the next potential disaster.