On January 26, 2000, the W3C released XHTML — an attempt to bring XML's strict discipline to web markup — which ironically became the standard everyone claimed to follow but almost no one implemented correctly, yet raised the culture of clean, structured HTML that persists to this day.
On March 4, 2000, Sony released the PlayStation 2 in Japan. It became the best-selling video game console in history at over 155 million units, and for many households it doubled as their first DVD player — accelerating the global adoption of the format.
On March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ reached 5048 points — the peak of the dot-com bubble. Within weeks the crash began. By 2002 the index had lost nearly 78% of its value, wiping out hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of companies. The survivors became the foundations of the modern internet.
On May 4, 2000, a 16-line Visual Basic script called ILOVEYOU infected tens of millions of computers within hours. It arrived from trusted contacts, overwrote files, and caused an estimated $5–10 billion in damage — one of the most destructive pieces of malware in history.
