by Brandon Smith, Alt Market:
As most people are aware, this month there was a sweeping internet outage across the US which led to a failure in roughly 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices. Disruptions included banks, airline networks, emergency call centers, online retailers and numerous corporate networks. The outage is estimated to have caused at least $5.4 billion in profit losses and it only lasted about a day.
The alleged cause of the breakdown was Crowdstrike, a cyber-security company that uses large scale data updates to Microsoft Windows networks to counter cyber threats. Instead, the company uploaded bugged code and caused a cascading outage. Mac and Linux machines were not affected.
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The scale of the shutdown was immense – Over 25% of Fortune 500 companies were frozen. Travel essentially stopped. Business transactions for many companies ceased. Some banks including Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, TD Bank and Wells Fargo could not function and customers could not access their accounts.
The event reminded me of the panic surrounding the Y2K scare 25 years ago. Of course, that was all nonsense; US systems were definitely not digitized to an extent great enough to cause a disaster should there be an internet crash or a software crash. But today things are very different. Nearly every sector of the American (and European) economy and many utilities are directly dependent on a functioning internet.
The fear that prevailed during Y2K was unrealistic in 1999. Now, it makes perfect sense.
I often hear preppers talk about the impending danger of an EMP leading to a grid down scenario. However, this kind of attack is highly overblown. Even major solar storms have not caused the kind of electrical breakdown that theorists suggest might happen. Instead, I would recommend worrying a lot more about cyber threats. I believe these events will become far more common in the next few years for a number of reasons.
First and foremost, there is the potential for random error like the Crowdstrike incident. Then there’s the potential for a foreign attack on US and European digital infrastructure. Then, there’s the potential for a false flag event BLAMED on random error or a foreign government in order to foment war or economic collapse.
In 2021 in my article ‘Cyber Polygon: Will The Next Globalist War Game Lead To Another Convenient Catastrophe?’ I warned that if the pandemic crisis failed to achieve the centralization goals of the World Economic Forum and other globalist institutions, they may use a cyber crisis instead. WEF head Klaus Schwab incessantly compared the idea of a “Cyber Pandemic” to the covid pandemic. He suggested that governments would have to respond to both in a similar fashion (i.e. lockdowns and extensive controls on individual freedoms).
In the past I have mentioned a very interesting event that was barely covered by the corporate media called the “Fastly Outage.” I examined the implications of this and more in my article ‘Obama’s Weird New Movie And America’s Extreme Vulnerability To Cyber Attack’.
In June of 2021 there was an internet outage that led to large swaths of the web going completely dark, including a number of mainstream news sites, Amazon, eBay, Twitch, Reddit, etc. A host of government websites also went down. All this happened when content delivery network (CDN) company Fastly experienced a “bug.” Although Amazon had its website back online within 20 minutes, the brief outage cost the company over $5.5 million in sales.
A content delivery network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. They make up what is known as the “backbone” of the internet. Only a handful of these company’s support a vast majority of internet activity. All it would take is for a few to go down, and the internet goes down, taking our economy with it.
The recent Crowdstrike situation is perhaps the worst web disruption of all time, and that was just a bug in a software update. Imagine if someone wanted to deliberately damage internet functions for an extended period of time? The results would be catastrophic.
With supply chains completely dependent on “just-in-time” freight deliveries and those deliveries dependent on efficient digital communications and payments between retailers and manufacturers, a web-down scenario for more than a few days would cause an immediate loss of consumer goods. Stores would empty within hours should the public realize that new shipments might not arrive for a long time.
