I kicked off my morning noticing a recent Iranian threat that read:
Iranian hacking group is warning America will soon see “unexpected and critical events” in telecommunications.
We’ve been warned. 😳
I’m thinking about the recent warnings regarding cyberattacks targeting physical critical infrastructure, such as water treatment systems and industrial control systems — warnings that involve AI being used as a weapon against physical utilities, rather than AI services themselves being brought down.
Sitting here in rural Indiana, I don’t feel a huge threat against REMC although maybe I should. If my T-mobile went down I’d live — but don’t take down my A/C this time of year. My puppies and I would feel that pain in ways I can’t even think about.
And then, Grok, ChatGPT and Claude all went down at the same time.
They’re saying the outage is unrelated to cyberattacks.
Blame is attributed to a simultaneous outage or degradation affecting ChatGPT/Codex, Claude, and Grok. OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI all posted status-page incidents for elevated errors or model outages and user reports spiked on DownDetector. They say it’s basically a cloud infrastructure issue — all use Microsoft Azure in one form or another.
All I can report with confidence is whatifitdid.com is currently online — and samsclub.com isn’t. I need to order coffee… the one item that is more important than eggs in this household.
Does it concern you that U.S. agencies have issued multiple official warnings in 2026 that foreign and other malicious actors are targeting American utilities and other critical infrastructure—especially water/wastewater and energy? (These warning were not offered as a hypothetical, but as activity already happening.)
Now you know: The famous ‘London Fog’ of Victorian novels wasn’t natural weather. It was toxic industrial pea-soup smog created by burning soft bituminous coal. In December 1952, the Great Smog of London became so thick that movie theaters closed because the screen wasn’t visible from the fourth row.