Was that a coincidence? Please don't leave us hanging.
1 billion Unix time was September 8, 2001.
Sep 9th actually. 0146 GMT.
Don't you see? Whether one event led to another is not important. We don't need to know for sure.
It's like the end of Inception.
Log file break/fix did not result in termination. But I probably wouldn't have remembered the former if it weren't for the latter.
I've conjectured before that 9-11 happenening so close to the epoch flip was deliberate, as a hint that middle-east radicals weren't really disorganized, saber-wielding incompetents as Hollywood portrayed them.