For those of you who are too young to remember or so old you’ve forgotten about it, back in 1999 the world was deathly afraid of something called Y2K. No one was entirely sure what it was but essentially it had something to do with all the calendars on computers switching from ’99’ to ’00’.

Apparently, computers would freak out and think it’s the year 0 and armageddon would basically take place because the world’s economy would crumble and traffic lights and air traffic control would go haywire, dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!

We survived. Not even a single computer exploded and nothing shut down. And yet thanks to Merrick Watts (and to a lesser extent Tim Rosso), the comedy duo who were triple j hosts at the time, in 2000 triple j did actually shut down.

As Merrick put it in his own words: “I did shut down the radio network. In the studios, when you go in, on the left-hand side, there’s a dial and there’s a sign that says very clearly ‘Do not, under any circumstances, flick this switch.'”

But as he recounted for triple j’s 40th anniversary special: “So Rosso said on air, ‘Mez, why don’t you go and flick the switch?’ and I said, ‘Okay.’ But he was joking, but I thought he was joking like ‘joking’, but ‘do it’ joking and it was joking ‘don’t do it’ joking.”

You can pretty much imagine what happened next, only you don’t have to because audio of the moment Watts shut down Australia’s national youth broadcaster still exists and you can hear it in the embed below or via SoundCloud.

Jen Oldershaw was a presenter and producer at triple j at the time. She’s the voice that can be heard calling Watts a “f***ing idiot”. “And we’re live on air and everything, the screen, every single button on the desk, everything went black and booted down,” she recounted.

“We were talking and I noticed one level on the board was bouncing and the quirk of this studio was that if there was a power cut, the last thing was playing would stay up and of course the last thing was the microphones, so everyone heard the conversation.”

As one listener commented in the triple j 30th anniversary guest book, “I will never forget driving home from work one day listening to Merrick and Rosso talk up their usual afternoon antics, when Merrick in all his wisdom dared to ask ‘What happens when I press this button?'”

“And then silence… followed by the Foo Fighters (the emergency CD). It only took a few minutes for them to come back but in that time I was laughing so hard I had to pull off the road and take a minute to catch my breath. Classic! Could you ever imagine that happening on Nova?”

“If it was scripted, they pulled it off well, but who knows?” another wrote. “The manic nature of when they hit the button and threw the station into chaos, unable to tell whether they were still on air or not is one of the clearest memories I have of the Js!”

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