Happy holidays, fellow engineers.
What a year 2025 has been. AI agents everywhere, more layoffs, the return-to-office wars continuing, and enough Slack notifications to last a lifetime. We're all exhausted. Nobody wants to read another hot take or industry analysis right now.
So let's not do that.
Instead, grab your drink of choice, find a comfortable spot, and let's take a break together. No frameworks. No uncomfortable truths. Just some wild stories about what happens to tech when everyone goes on vacation.
Running remote teams in Ukraine during the holiday period is chaotic. Half the team celebrates Christmas on December 25th, half on January 7th. New Year's is sacred for everyone. Smart engineering leaders freeze deployments from December 20th to January 15th. I've read all the best practices. I know the risks. My next release is January 2nd. Some lessons we learn. Others, we just keep writing about.
Here's a fun fact for your next holiday dinner: Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web on Christmas Day 1990. His wife was nine months pregnant at the time. The baby arrived on New Year's Day.
His colleagues said he fathered two babies that holiday season. One changed diapers. The other changed civilization.
Turns out, the week between Christmas and New Year's has a habit of making tech history. Some of it is brilliant. Some of it is catastrophic. All of it is surprisingly entertaining.
The Internet Has Three Birthdays (All During Holidays)
The web went live on Christmas 1990. But the internet itself? That was born on New Year's Day 1983, when ARPANET switched to TCP/IP.
And DNS, the system that lets you type "google.com" instead of memorizing numbers? January 1, 1985.
Three foundational technologies. All launched while everyone else was eating leftovers and watching football.
Why? January 1st is actually genius timing. Minimal traffic. Clean calendar date. And if something breaks, you have a few days to fix it before anyone notices.
Engineers have been exploiting this window for decades.
The $429 Million Christmas Miracle
Five days before Christmas 1996, Apple made an announcement that saved the company.
They bought NeXT for $429 million. More importantly, they got Steve Jobs back.
Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy. Their next-generation operating system had just failed. They were out of options.
Gil Amelio, Apple's CEO at the time, told 200 journalists: "I'm not buying software. I'm buying Steve."
That software became Mac OS X. Then iOS. Then the foundation of every Apple device you own today.
Apple went from near-death to becoming the first $3 trillion company in history. All because of a deal signed during the holiday shopping season.
The Christmas Tree That Crashed IBM
In December 1987, a German student wrote a simple program. It displayed an ASCII Christmas tree on your screen, made of text characters, very festive, and then emailed itself to everyone in your address book.
Harmless holiday cheer, right?
It crashed 350,000 IBM terminals worldwide. Networks collapsed under the load. The first viral computer worm in history spread through corporate email systems like wildfire.
They called it the Christmas Tree EXEC. It became the template for every email virus that followed, including the infamous ILOVEYOU worm thirteen years later.
The lesson: never trust festive ASCII art from strangers.
Gaming's Grinch Moment
Christmas Day 2014. Millions of kids unwrap new PlayStation and Xbox consoles. They rush to set them up. They try to go online.
Nothing works.
A hacking group called Lizard Squad had taken down both PlayStation Network and Xbox Live simultaneously. 158 million gamers. Christmas morning. No online gaming.
The attack only stopped when Kim Dotcom (yes, that Kim Dotcom) bribed them with free cloud storage accounts.
Merry Christmas, gamers.
The Bug That Killed a Million Zunes at Midnight
Remember the Zune? Microsoft's iPod competitor?
On December 31, 2008, at exactly midnight, every single Zune 30GB in the world froze. Simultaneously. A million devices, dead at the same moment.
The culprit was a tiny bug in how the device handled leap years:
if (days > 366) {
days -= 366;
year += 1;
}
On day 366 of a leap year, the code got stuck in an infinite loop. The Zune literally couldn't handle New Year's Eve.
Users had to wait 24 hours for the problem to fix itself. By then, the jokes had already gone viral.
The Zune never recovered its reputation. Edge cases matter, kids.
Y2K: The Party That Almost Wasn't
Remember the millennium bug panic? Planes were supposed to fall from the sky. Banks would lose all your money. Civilization might collapse.
Companies spent somewhere between $300 and $600 billion preparing for January 1, 2000.
What actually happened? A video rental store in New York charged a customer $91,250 for "100 years" of late fees. Some spy satellites got confused for three days. A few nuclear plant sensors glitched.
That's it.
Was Y2K overblown? Actually, no. The reason nothing catastrophic happened is that all that preparation worked. Engineers spent years fixing code. The boring heroes who saved New Year's 2000 never got proper credit.
Netflix's Worst Christmas Ever (And Why It Made Them Better)
Christmas Eve 2012. Families settle in to watch movies together. Netflix goes down.
A developer accidentally ran a maintenance command on live production data in AWS. The outage lasted 20 hours. Millions of holiday movie nights, ruined.
But here's the twist: this disaster led Netflix to pioneer "Chaos Engineering," deliberately breaking their own systems to make them stronger. They built tools with names like Chaos Monkey that randomly kill servers to test resilience.
Now the whole industry does this. Your streaming services are more reliable today because Netflix had a terrible Christmas thirteen years ago.
The Holiday Hacker Calendar
Cybersecurity teams have learned to dread December. Attacks spike by 30% during the holidays. 76% of ransomware encryptions happen when offices are empty.
Hackers know IT teams run skeleton crews. Response times slow down. Everyone's distracted by eggnog.
In 2020, the massive SolarWinds hack, which compromised the Treasury Department, State Department, and thousands of companies, was discovered during the Christmas period. Emergency response ran through New Year's Eve.
Now Europol runs preemptive operations every December, taking down hacking infrastructure before the holidays begin. In 2024, they seized 27 attack-for-hire services right before Christmas.
The war on holiday hackers is now an annual tradition.
Why This Keeps Happening
The pattern is clear: holidays create a unique window in tech.
For builders, it's quiet time. No meetings. No distractions. Tim Berners-Lee built the web while waiting for his baby to arrive. Sometimes the best work happens when the world slows down.
For companies, January 1st is the perfect launch date. Clean slate. Fresh start. Symbolic timing that engineers have exploited for decades.
For attackers, it's an opportunity. Empty offices. Slow responses. Maximum chaos potential.
For all of us, it's a reminder that tech doesn't take holidays even when we do.
One Last Story
December 2022. A ransomware group attacked Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, a children's hospital, right before Christmas.
Patient care was delayed. Systems went down. Families with sick kids faced even more stress during the holidays.
Then something unexpected happened. The ransomware group publicly apologized. They said their affiliate "violated our rules" by targeting a children's hospital. They offered a free decryption key.
Even cybercriminals have some holiday spirit, apparently.
So there you go. A brief history of tech during the holidays: the launches, the crashes, the hacks, and the occasional miracle.
Next time you're relaxing between Christmas and New Year's, remember: somewhere, an engineer is either making history or preventing disaster.
Hopefully not both at the same time.
Happy holidays. May your deployments be frozen and your systems stay up.
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