You might have presumed it happened years or even decades ago; however, on June 28, Japan officially stopped using floppy disks in government offices.
"We have won the war on floppy disks," Japan's Digital Minister Taro Kono said in a statement to Reuters after replacing the final disk.
Until last month, more than 1,000 regulations in Japan involved the use of floppy disks. Kono, who has been very vocal about replacing analog technology in government, stepped in to modernize things during the pandemic. (He's also an advocate for getting rid of fax machines.)
Here in the US, the military used floppy disks to control nuclear weapons until 2019.
As we noted in our 2022 look back at the evolution of PC storage media, 3.5-inch floppies were a mainstay of PC software well into the 90s; 5 billion 3.5-inch floppies were in use by 1996. But the small diskettes couldn’t keep up with the demands of bloated software. Sony, one of the biggest manufacturers, stopped making 3.5-inch floppies in 2011.